The UK was once the most LGBTQ+ friendly country in Europe – now it’s 22nd

8 comments

1. queue this sub and r/ukpolitics “what’s the big deal”ing lmao

2. Almost all remaining points from the “Legal gender recognition” section have been removed, with only the ones regarding name change remaining, which has caused this fall.

   Recommendations from the Rainbow Map website:

   > Ensure timely and accessible trans healthcare, including addressing excessive waiting times and restoring access to puberty blockers for trans youth outside restrictive research frameworks

   > Conversion practices (sexual orientation, gender identity) prohibited

3. Because some wankers would rather pick fights with minorities that have zero measurable impact on their lives rather than address actual issues within the country, feel free to decide for yourself who I’m talking about.

4. This is surely very subjective, and dependent on which side is deemed correct on issues where there are mutually incompatible positions.

   A “near-complete lack of rights for intersex people” sounds a bit of an exaggeration.

   Not banning “hate speech” scores badly here, but scores well on indexes of freedom of expression

5. This is more a case of which boxes are ticked on their scorecard rather than any real change, isn’t it? Would you really rather be gay or trans in Montenegro?

   Even after the change in interpretation of the Equality Act, being trans (and that’s what this is about, the “LGBQ” part of the acronym is in the same position it was before) is still a protected characteristic so you can’t be discriminated against for service provision, jobs or anything like that for being trans.

   I honestly feel this kind of emphasis is unhelpful, it makes out that the UK is a terrible place to be trans, and that just isn’t true. That kind of sentiment can be self-reinforcing though, as the actual transphobes will be emboldened by it because they think their position is more normal than it is, ironically making it more normalised.

6. One of the the post EU Referendum effects of ” moving closer to (Republican) America ”, brought to us by our ever loving Conservative Party under the instruction of Nigel Farage- Trump’s man in Britain

   A right royal stitch up

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8. It’s very plain that Britain’s pivot against Transgender people was some kind of psy-op. Our mainstream culture was vocally pro-trans until suddenly it wasn’t.

   We offered Gender reassignment surgery on the NHS since the 1960’s.
   Britain passed a law to make transgender people legally recognised and protected from workplace discrimination in 2004.
   The sodding Tories ordered the Tavistock Clinic be used for helping children transition (the GIDS unit as it was called, was founded under Maggie Thatcher). They knew what that was and they thought it was a good idea!

   There were complaints of course, but those were insignificant in number. Ignored the same way we ignore people calling for Abortion to be banned. Many newspapers in 2022 would cite the complaints of Sue Evans, a nurse at Tavistock, as evidence that staff found the practice objectionable. They failed to mention that Sue Evans had made those complaints public in 2005 and everyone (themselves included) had ignored her.

   Then one day something snapped. As if a decision had been made that the public needed a distraction from the daily news of Tory failures.

   Suddenly all the Tory-aligned media began bleating that Transgenderism was sick, that people who wanted to transition were mentally ill. Tory politicians who created the GIDS department at the Tavistock clinic cried that it’s existence was an outrage. Everyone started to pretend they had never heard of trans people before, and that it was suddenly something they needed permission for.

   Every one of those news outlets was around when sex reassignment was legal. The Tories knew what the permissive laws were. Every workplace manager in the country has been coached that you need to address staff by their chosen pronouns since 2004 or risk a lawsuit.

   There were no objections. Until… one day, a bunch of politicians and media bosses decided it was time for the British public to be enraged about something that they hadn’t been the day before. And it worked. It was on top of everything else, fucking spooky. A shining example of the fact a huge chunk of the population just let the Daily Mail the Sun and The Telegraph tell them what to think.

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