War on woke

Things are harder than they used to be for those affected. But minority life has never been easy. Take the UK as an example. The 60s and 70s seemed to herald a new era of tolerance and inclusiveness. The law on sexual offences was liberalised, bringing freedom from guilt for the gay community. But the backlash soon followed. HIV/AIDS emerged and was proclaimed God's judgement on gays. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 banned local authorities from promoting homosexual activity, particularly in schools. 

In the 1990s the British government launched the Back to Basics campaign, an attempt to portray the ruling Conservative Party as the guardians of morality and family values. I was working in the office of a government minister at the time and I saw a letter from the Prime Minister's office encouraging government spokesmen to use phrases like "basic common sense" in speeches on government policy. Then the media revealed that the Prime Minister was having an affair with a junior Health Minister, and the campaign was quietly dropped.

More recently, the culture wars began. Political correctness, in its modern guise of woke behaviour, became the punchbag of the tabloid press, and politicians took up arms against it. The most recent Conservative Prime Minister gave a widely-publicised speech arguing that men were men and women were women, as if this was an obvious and common-sense position. In 2024 the Minister for Common Sense (yes there really was such a position) banned civil servants from using rainbow lanyards to hold their official badges. 

Here and elsewhere, the attack has come from politicians on the right of the political spectrum, whether democratic or authoritarian. Members of the public with progressive views (I am one of these) welcomed the election of the centre-left Labour Government last year as the first step in turning the tide. In fact the Labour election manifesto included a promise to simplify the process for obtaining a gender recognition certificate – allowing individuals to change their legal gender with the approval of only one doctor and without having to wait two years for their application to take effect.

So it was depressing to learn, earlier this year, that the government had dropped this promised reform. This was widely seen as a defensive measure in the face of growing pressure from the UK's far-right party and the popular press. Almost as if the government believed that the national mood was socially-conservative and that this needed to be reinforced rather than challenged. I am not sure how much evidence there is for this view of the British public. I thought society was more liberal as a whole – certainly in my individual experience as an emerging trans person. I have not had any abuse or faced any hostility at all.

The smaller progressive parties in the UK – the Greens and the Liberal Democrats – are solidly in favour of diversity, equality and inclusion. But then there is no prospect of their being elected to power. So they don't need to follow populist conceptions of public attitudes.

I often wonder why minority groups – in my case, the trans community – face such opposition. I have seen attempts to justify it on the grounds that we are a danger to children, seeking to corrupt them either physically or morally. Again there is no evidence for this. Recent news reports suggest that children are more at risk from Church of England or Roman Catholic priests than they are from lay trans people. And all the trans people I know seem to be nicer, kinder, more loving, than they were before they transitioned. This is what you would expect when people accept their true identity and find peace in themselves.

It's more likely that minorities such as ours are attacked simply because we are different. Running the country is a difficult business. Governments of various persuasions turn the spotlight on minorities because they need scapegoats on whom to pin the blame for social or economic problems which governments themselves have not been able to rectify.

What can we do in response to such concerted attacks on our rights? Stand together, be brave enough to express ourselves, protest in peaceful ways, in the hope that one day the climate will change. We are better than those attack our rights. We have to show we are better in the way we react.

Tags: LGBT+