The last 24 hours or so has brought up some interesting LGBT politics on Twitter.
It started last night when Christine Burns reported back from the first ever LGBT summit at 10 Downing Street. Sadly Christine wasn’t allowed to tweet from within No. 10, but here are a couple of things she said afterward:
Historic event. First ever LGBT reception at Downing Street. Gordon Brown “We are with you”. Great throng. Many cheers. Altogether moving.
and:
Oops how could I forget? Gordon made specific reference to the unacceptability of CA Prop 8 invalidating thousands of same sex partnerships
The Prop. 8 story was picked up by Pink News which has much more to say on the subject. For once I am rather proud of my Prime Minister.
Meanwhile Christine has pointed me at a couple of interesting new publications. The first is document by the British Medical Association celebrating LGBT doctors. Some of it is rather depressing reading, but it is a major step forward that the BMA should publish anything like this at all. The second is a report by researchers at the Universities of Leeds and Calgary into the experiences of LGBT people in higher education. Again it makes rather depressing reading, and I’d like to highlight this issue:
15% of LGB and 34.8% of trans students fear losing financial support from their parents if they find out their sexual orientation or trans status.
The parents of 4.9% of LGB students and 7.1% of trans students have withdrawn financial support on finding out about their sexual orientation or trans status. A further 3% of LGB students and 9.2% of trans students are, in effect, estranged from their parents, but do not know how to prove this legally and so are receiving no financial support.
Doing the sums, that makes over 50% of trans students who either have been, or fear being, disowned by their parents if their trans status is made public. So much for family, eh?
And finally (on a rather good day for Christine sending me stuff), a demonstration of the power of Twitter. Today Amnesty UK ran the One Ten campaign to highlight the fact that each year approximately 1 in 10 women in the UK are victims or rape or violence. The call went out for a coordinated tweet at 1:10pm, and it worked very well because we made it onto TwitScoop.
All in all, a very interesting 24 hours, and many thanks to Christine for sending it all my way.
Maybe it’s my cis-privileged perspective showing, but I read those statistics a bit more positively. It seems natural to fear loss of parental support, but in fact it usually _doesn’t_ happen.
The people in these statistics are college students who aren’t “out” to their parents – there’s got to be a bit of tension in that relationship already. And if these people have recently left home and started living their own lives the way they want for the first time, it can be a bit of a shock for their families. It probably shouldn’t be, in many cases, but still … And people are really, really weird about gender (I find this so fascinating). I think parents usually come to accept their LGBT kids – sadly, “T” seems harder than “L/G” or “B” – but some take several years. Of course, that’s the worst time to lose support if you want to finish school, so it’s certainly worth looking at what kind of safety net could be there.
It would be nice if all kids could know their parents loved them unconditionally. Let’s keep working on that.
I’m reading to see how a “Celebration of [LGBT] doctors’ contributions” comes out depressing too! 😉
But I am proud of your Prime Minister as well. As an American it is very weird for me to think about politicians having these events – every now and then I’m reminded that the pilgrims who founded my country were religious fundamentalists! (Why couldn’t we have got the criminals, like Australia did? 😛 )
Erink:
Well, things may be better these days, but in my experience family reaction to someone coming out as T is often worse than the T person fears.
That sucks. It really, really sucks.
I hope I can help make it better.