Don’t let divide and conquer tactics win (Picture: Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk)

It’s LGBT history month. Some celebrate by remembering the awesome people who risked reputations, careers, life and limb to battle bigotry.

But some people seem to think the battle for equality has been won – and they’re linking arms with the bad guys.

Nearly 50 years after trans women and allies kick-started the LGBT rights era, some people want to throw them under the very same bus that they helped to start.

The bigots know we’re stronger together.


So they’re trying to drive us apart.

You’ve got to fight for your rights

Do you remember when the religious right said that equal rights for gay people would mean predators in bathrooms and people marrying dogs? Yeah! Fun times!



Now they’re saying it about trans people.

Here’s the US Family Research Council. You may remember their other hits, which include ‘homosexuals are destructive to society’, demands that the US outlaw ‘gay behaviour’ and flyers detailing the ‘hazards of homosexuality’.

They want to separate the T from LGBT. ‘If you separate the T from the alphabet soup,’ they reportedly told their supporters, ‘we’ll have more success’.

By success they mean undoing decades of progress in equal rights.

They’re using the very same lies that they tried to use against gay people. Predators following your children into bathrooms. Brainwashed children getting involved in unspeakable, life-ruining depravity. A sinister agenda.

It’s called ‘othering’.

And it’s working.

A new report from GLAAD finds that for the first time in years, support for LGBT rights is going backwards.

Are we the baddies?

Why on Earth could anti-LGBT sentiment be growing?

Could it be a supposedly LGBT-friendly President who’s eroded LGBT rights since taking office?

Could it be an often anti-LGBT media?

Could it be a culture where actual Nazis think it’s okay to Nazi around in public?

Could it be that people think it’s OK to be bigoted in public again?

No, silly! It’s the trans!

There’s a growing trend in the right-wing media for gay men to blame trans women for, well, everything.

One of the most high-profile examples is Andrew Sullivan. Writing in New York Magazine, he says that the problem is ‘a reaction of many ordinary people to the excesses of the social-justice left’.

Further LGBT equality is ‘a battle none of us need to fight. Especially after the real war was won.’

Oh, honey. Who do you think they’re going to come for when they’re done with us?

‘Could it be that people think it’s OK to be bigoted in public again?’ (Picture: Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk)

Rights in reverse

If you think the real war for equality has been won, you really haven’t been paying attention.

Bigots are trying to stir up hatred of trans people as part of a wedge strategy to roll back equal rights for everybody.

Scratch the surface of an anti-trans bill and you’ve usually got an anti-gay, anti-women bill that’s designed to take everybody way back in time.



For example, in the US, new protections will enable religious people to refuse to treat trans people.

We’re not talking orchiectomies and vaginoplasty here.

We’re talking basic medicine.

First aid after car crashes. Broken legs. Cancer treatment.

But trans people are just the headline. Dig a little deeper and -– surprise – they don’t want to treat the gays or women either.

That means nurses refusing to help women with post-abortion complications.

No IVF for lesbians.

And, in the case of this Mississippi law, it’s not just healthcare.

It’s housing, employment and adoption.

If you tolerate this, your children will be next.

Pulling up the ladder

None of this is new.

From the 1970s onwards, gay rights movements often dumped the trans folk because they felt including them might make the struggle harder.

Radical feminism was famously fractious in the 70s and 80s.

Even now some feminists – thankfully a tiny minority, albeit a vocal one – are incredibly vicious towards trans women.

Every minority group has what Bret Easton Ellis controversially called Gay Magical Elves: ‘The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay [who] is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors – as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult.’

Eddie Izzard differentiated between weirdo transvestites and executive transvestites; some transsexuals sneer at non-transitioned trans folks; some gay men call themselves androphiles because they don’t like Britney or musicals.

Even Stonewall – yes, Stonewall – didn’t support trans people until very recently.


Mind you, it wasn’t too sure about equal marriage either.

And that’s fine, except when it isn’t. Sometimes it means people pull up the ladder behind them.

‘I’ve got mine,’ the message goes. ‘I don’t care about you.’

Or as some might put it, ‘the real war was won’.

That’s exactly what the bigots want.

Stronger together

Progress isn’t inevitable or permanent. Look at Germany in the 1930s, famously LGBT-friendly right up until they started burning the books.

Many of our current rights are the result of the EU and may not survive Brexit.

It seems that every Obama-era LGBT-friendly step is being reversed by the current US administration.

One in eight trans people in the UK has been physically attacked by a colleague or customer at work and one in five LGBT people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity in the past year.

Trans people might not have much in common with other LGB people (although, of course, many trans people are LGB too). But we sure have a common enemy – and that enemy is using trans people as a smokescreen for the same old anti-LGBT bigotry.

It’s called divide and conquer.

They’re not going to stop when they’re done with us.

So now is the time for us LGBT folk to stick together and fight the bigots that want to harm us all.

MORE: Why 2017 was the best year in history for trans people


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MORE: On Transgender Day of Remembrance, let’s think about the children

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