It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Sharma. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) on securing this important debate.
Section 28 was repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland—some three years before England—thanks to the Labour party, which was then in power in Scotland. As a Scot, I am very proud that the Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Act 2000, which repealed section 28, was one of the first pieces of legislation enacted by the new Scottish Parliament. What I am not proud of is those who campaigned so viciously against the repeal of section 28, and the politicians who sat on the fence. However, I want to take a moment to applaud those who took such a brave stand, particularly the then Communities Minister, Wendy Alexander MSP, and many of my SNP colleagues who supported the repeal. However, what I want to talk about today is the campaign against the introduction of section 28 back in 1988, in which I played a small part.
When section 28 was first mooted in 1988, I was 21 and at university in Edinburgh.
I had just come out as a lesbian and most of my close friends were lesbians and gay men. There was a really vibrant gay scene in Edinburgh and we had hoped that maybe society was changing. Section 28 dented our optimism, but it did not stop us campaigning vigorously against it. The wonderful Blue Moon café set up by friends of mine at the Lesbian and Gay Centre in Broughton Street in Edinburgh was the hub of our activism and a group was set up called the Scottish Homosexual Action Group, or SHAG for short. It organised rallies and a march in Edinburgh, and buses went to London for the mass demos here. We also went to the big demonstration in Manchester in February 1988. I was proud to attend all those rallies and marches with my then girlfriend; I wonder where she is now.
The Scottish Homosexual Action Group also organised a big event in Edinburgh called the Lark in the Park, which took place in the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens. It was a festival of music and comedy with a political agenda and Sir Ian McKellen, who had just come out in response to the proposal of clause 28, spoke in Princes Street Gardens. That event went on for another couple of years and was the precursor of the first Pride marches in Scotland.
One of the interesting things about the campaign against section 28 back in 1988 was that lesbian feminists played a big role. Many of them had never worked with
men before or had not done so for many years. Gay men were sometimes a bit taken aback by all these feisty women, but we worked well together in the end. I want to take a moment to remember that that was going on at the height of the AIDS pandemic when young men, including some of my contemporaries at university, were dying of AIDS. I want to take a moment to remember some of those young men, who had such great promise but who did not make it.
Returning to the involvement of lesbians, many lesbian feminists brought to the fight against section 28 experience of direct action from their campaigns against pornography and violence against women. Some of the lesbians involved had children and they took particular offence at their families being called a “pretended family relationship”. Those who were around at the time, or who have studied the history of the period, will remember the lesbians who abseiled into the House of Lords and who stormed “BBC News” live at 6 pm. I remember I was sitting in my flat with my flatmates watching the news when we saw all these women, who were obviously lesbians, shouting about section 28. One of them even handcuffed herself to Sue Lawley’s chair, which was highly amusing. As my friend Julie Bindel reminded me the other day, lesbians even stormed the Ideal Home exhibition just to remind everyone that, as she said, lesbians make the best families. I mention all that because I fear that lesbian activism is rather frowned upon today, unless it has been approved of in advance by straight people and some men who think they can set our boundaries for us. They cannot and should not try to do so.
I want to remind hon. Members of what section 28 actually said. It prohibited local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or promoting the teaching of
“the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”
It was all about the state clamping down on any support for the idea that it might be normal to be homosexual.
To be homosexual means to be sexually interested in and attracted to members of one’s own sex. That might not always have been popular, but it has been well understood for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Our movement at that time was a movement for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights; the rights of the same-sex attracted. Yes, we had supporters from the trans community, and I particularly remember the wonderful magician Fay Presto, a trans woman who was very involved in the Lark in the Park. However, section 28 was not about an attack on trans people; it was an attack on the same-sex attracted.
When Stonewall was founded in response to section 28, it focused exclusively at that time on same-sex rights. The initials LGBT or LGBTQ were not used until after the CEO Ben Summerskill left in 2014. As a recent survey by my friends at LGB Alliance shows, many lesbians and gays, including myself, do not like being called “queer”. To me, queer is about being bashed. I was queer-bashed in the 1980s and many of my friends have been queer-bashed. I do not accept the word “queer”. If others want to, that is fine, but many of us do not like it.
I want to make it unequivocally clear that I believe in equal rights for everyone and equal rights for trans people, but the protection of gay people is a separate thing.
The protection for gay people and trans people that was achieved in the Equality Act 2010 was a triumph for two distinct and different movements that were campaigning separately. If Members want to know whether that is true or not, they can go back to Stonewall’s 2011 guide to the Equality Act for employers, which is 48 pages long and focuses on the rights of the same-sex attracted. It does not use the acronym LGBT. Human rights and equal rights are for everyone but, as my friend Allison Bailey has said, the rights of lesbians and gay men are not dependent on accepting gender identity theory, and many of us do not.
I therefore disagree with the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), for whom I have the utmost respect, that there is an equivalence between the fight against section 28 and the fight that some lesbians and gay men are undertaking to prevent gender identity theory from erasing the notion of same-sex attraction. I know that there is no equivalence between those two fights because, unlike a lot of the people in this room, I was there in 1988; I was out in 1988, and I was part of the struggle against section 28. I know what I was campaigning for; I was campaigning against an attack on the rights of same-sex attracted people, like me, and on our very right to be who we were.
Section 28 meant that many teenage girls were left confused and ashamed of their exclusive sexual attraction to other girls, with no one to talk to about that. I am afraid to say that that is the situation for many young lesbians today. I have been approached by constituents whose daughters are lesbians and have been told at school that, because they are attracted to girls, they must be a boy trapped in a girl’s body. Many young lesbians feel under pressure to deny their exclusive same-sex attraction and are bamboozled by a welter of indefinable niche identities such as bigender, gender queer and demifluid, which overlap and confuse them. The tragedy is that, in both cases—back in section 28 days and now—it is the state that is enforcing an ideology that undermines the rights of the same-sex attracted. Thank goodness we have organisations, like my friends in LGB Alliance, who exist to promote the rights of same-sex attracted people, now that Stonewall have given up on us. The fight against section 28 was a fight against those who wanted to destroy the reality of lesbian and gay lives; they wanted to erase us from contemporary life. That failed, and I really hope that any attempt to do so in contemporary times will fail.
As I have a bit more time than I thought I would, I want to add a few points, picking up on what other people have said. The first is about the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Equality and Human Rights Commission was reaccredited for five years by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions last October. The only reason why Stonewall and others have tried to get this special investigation into the EHRC is that it wrote to the Government asking them to look at the question of protecting the rights of women and of the same-sex attracted. Stonewall is referring the EHRC to the UN because the EHRC will not accept gender identity theory as the defining belief of our times. The EHRC is there to protect the rights of everyone—the rights of all beliefs and none—not just those who believe in gender identity theory. I think it is a real shame that Stonewall’s antagonism towards the EHRC has not been resolved by democratic debate and
discussion here, rather than by referring it to the United Nations. I will be astonished if the EHRC loses its A categorisation as a national human rights institution simply for sticking up for the rights of all, rather than for the rights of just one group and for one group’s way of identifying rights.
On the issue of conversion therapy, of course all of us oppose the idea that anyone should be forcibly made to reconsider either their gender identity or their same-sex attraction, but the conversion therapy that worries me most is the one which I have already described: that of young girls who are attracted to other young women or young girls who are uncomfortable with their bodies and uncomfortable with puberty, and who are being told, rather than being lesbians or young women who are just uncomfortable with puberty, that they must be boys trapped in girls’ bodies. That is the conversion therapy that I am really worried about.
On veterans, I was in the House when the apology was made. One of my ex-girlfriends was thrown out of the Royal Military Police—after very distinguished service—for being a lesbian. An apology is one thing, but what the Government really need to do is give these people compensation. Not only did being thrown out cause people terrible distress, but it undermined their employability, and they lost their pensions. I really appeal to the Government to look at the recommendations of the independent review and to start giving compensation to people such as my friend.
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