“I believe they call us the alphabet mafia these days,” a gay man told me recently, laughing over how complicated LGBTQ+ acronyms have become. They are not a subject of amusement only for outsiders – but there’s a reason for them.
When the catchy acronym of IDAHO (also a reference to a Gus Van Sant film with Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix) was extended, it was because people felt it was important to be inclusive, to be explicit about the different kinds of prejudice aimed at people because, though they’re not harming anyone, their desires or bodies differ from the norm. We need to be explicit, too, about homophobia, even though many members of the wider public assume that these days it has gone away. That’s because we know that if we don’t continue to actively address these problems, they get worse.
LGBTQ+ history: there and back again?
The idea of men being locked up in prison for having consensual sex with each other now seems barbaric to most people in Scotland, but at the start of the 1980s, it was still happening here. It was very difficult to be out back then. Gay men and lesbians faced high levels of aggression and were discriminated against in virtually every area of life. Bisexual people often faced the same discrimination, despite a prevailing attitude that they were deluded and that their sexual preferences weren’t real.
Trans people generally existed in secret, able to present themselves as they really were only in discreet private settings, if at all. On the rare occasions that intersex people were acknowledged, it was within a climate of secrecy and shame. No matter how bad things may seem to some today, they have got better – but there is real fear that some political factions are trying to take us back to the bad old days.
There are people who say that they’re sick of hearing about LGBTQ+ people, and that if we all just shut up about it and stopped being annoying, people would leave us alone. Unfortunately, that’s not borne out by the evidence. Most of us just want to get on with our lives, but we have learned that whether or not we choose to be political, we are politicised. Other people turn our lives into political issues because it’s convenient to do so. Consider the current fuss about trans people. Where was that ten years ago? Trans women were using the same toilets and playing the same sports then, but for the most part, the wider public neither noticed nor cared.
Politics and prejudice
The thing about LGBTQ+ people is that we make perfect political scapegoats. There are enough of us for us to be presented as a threat, but not so many that we have much real political power. We pop up fairly randomly in the population, so anybody could be secretly one of us, which makes it easy to frame people that way – a trick sometimes used by politicians against their rivals in the not-so-distant past. As long as we live in secrecy, we can be described in the most egregious terms, presented as monstrous, and a lot of people will believe it because they don’t know any better. Coming out and speaking up makes this latter tactic more difficult to use, but it’s still very much in action against trans people, one of the smaller groups under the alphabet umbrella.
Meanwhile, intersex people, who don’t have the numbers to make their presence felt even to that degree, fall prey to another tactic – being spoken for and about by self-appointed experts, rarely intersex themselves, who perpetuate the idea of shame and deny that anybody has a real intersex identity. This kind of erasure does its own kind of damage, making it harder to develop community resources and leaving many people isolated and vulnerable – easy targets for more explicit intersexphobia.
At a psychological level, it can be much harder to understand. Why do people become obsessed with what consenting strangers do in bed together? Why do they care who falls in love with who, if no-one’s heart is broken? Why is the shape of somebody else’s genitals important if you’re not planning to sleep with them? Growing up as an LGBTQ+ person and becoming aware that those ideas are out there is very confusing. Many people say that they learned to keep it quiet long before they understood why. In the absence of affirming role models and LGBTQ+ inclusive education, it’s easy for children to be frightened. This happens even in loving families where there’s never a possibility of them not being accepted.
Conversion practices and the cost of being different
Of course, even today, not all LGBTQ+ young people are accepted by their families, and as a result they’re significantly more likely than average to end up homeless, with all the knock-on problems that creates. It can be hard to imagine why someone would reject their own child, but disgust and fear – the chief weapons of unscrupulous political manipulators – are powerful motivators, and often lead to irrational behaviour. Some parents try to deal with their emotional conflicts by convincing themselves that they can ‘fix’ their children instead.
With intersex children this often takes the form of surgery carried out before children are old enough to make their own informed choices. With LGBT people, it might involve visits to a coercive ‘therapist’ (most reputable therapy organisations ban such treatments), sending a child abroad to be subjected to violence or hard labour until they break, or even an exorcism. The people carrying out these procedures often claim that they are helping the children involved, but studies of adult survivors paint a very different picture.
Despite the protections afforded by the Equality Act (notwithstanding the recent confusing interpretation of it offered by the Supreme Court), LGBTQ+ people continue to face discrimination in healthcare, housing and employment, and it all comes back to prejudice.
That’s why days like IDAHOBIT matter – to signal boost those who are pushing in the other direction, and to send a message to every individual affected that the particular types of problem they face are seen and understood; that they are not alone. Today we take a stand against homophobia, biphobia, intersexphobia and transphobia. Next month, when Pride parades happen across Scotland, we reject individual experiences of shame; we celebrate the joy that comes from discovering that most people do accept us, and that we have each other, and that our humanity matters after all.
The progress that we have made is still in danger. In some areas, our rights have regressed. But we won’t give up on working to make things better, even if we’re just chasing rainbows.
More in society.
