Pride Month
Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Wera Hobhouse(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Bradshaw
They do need to get better. A quarter of all homeless young people are LGBTQ+. Some 77% of those have suffered rejection or abuse from their families.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
As a patron of the Albert Kennedy Trust, I was shocked when I first heard the statistics on homelessness among LGBT+ people. Is it not time we celebrate the work of the Albert Kennedy Trust and praise it for bringing to light these terrible statistics and tragic stories?
Mr Bradshaw
Yes, indeed. In fact, perhaps I should have declared an interest as a long-time supporter of the Albert Kennedy Trust.
On crime, as other colleagues have noted, hate crimes against LGBT people and trans people in particular have risen dramatically. Now the Government plan to amend the Equality Act 2010 in a way that would make the exclusion of trans people the norm. Counselling and medical care for people with gender dysphoria and for young people in particular is practically non-existent. The south-west’s only clinic for gender dysphoria, in Exeter, has an initial waiting time of seven years.
As other colleagues have said, we only have to look at America to see what happens when rational, evidence-based policy is replaced by hate, fundamentalist ideology and moral panic. In America this year, a record 520 pieces of anti-LGBT legislation have been introduced at state level, 220 of which focus specifically on trans and non- binary people. A record 70 anti-LGBT laws have already been enacted. Fifteen ban gender-affirming healthcare, seven require or allow students to be misgendered, four censor the school curriculum and there are many more.
We had the appalling spectacle this week of grandparents in Canada stopping a school sports contest to demand that a 9-year-old cis girl be physically examined to make sure she really was a girl. They thought that she was a boy who had an unfair advantage over their granddaughter. This is what happens when Governments and the press pursue a culture war. We have friends, a gay couple with a daughter, who live in Florida. They are leaving because they are frightened. Culture wars, as the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) said, will not restrict themselves to attacks on LGBTQ+ people. The whole of the equalities space will eventually come into their sights. An attack on trans people is an attack on all of us.
I am afraid that a number of politicians, right-wing think-tanks and powerful media supporters here in the UK seem to want us to go down the route of the Republican states in America. The deputy chairman of the Conservative party says he wants to run the next election campaign on these culture war issues and on trans issues in particular. I have a mild caution for him and the Prime Minister, from my experience 26 years ago. Then, the Conservative party thought that by running a virulently homophobic campaign against me they would hold Exeter and gain votes nationally. It suffered its worst swing to Labour in the south-west and its worst general election defeat in modern history. If it wants to continue to row back LGBT rights and equality, and to fight the next election on that terrain, I believe it will discover, as it did back then, that the British people are better than they think and a lot better than them.