No Safe Places?

“Suzie takes me to a gay bar in Glasgow. As we link arms we become visibly queer. Add to this the ebony and ivory theme we have going and we stand out a mile away. The cold air takes on that old familiar edge: a primitive instinct: ‘watch your back’. We arrive outside the bar. For a moment I feel safe and relieved. But as we enter that instinct kicks in again: ‘keep your eyes open’. The bar is all male and all white. The looks we get every day are a constant reminder and past experiences have taught us: there just aren’t any safe places if you are black and gay.” (Anon, Scotland)

This is the kind of situation that minority ethnic people who are LGBT experience every day. 

The problem is not unique to Scotland. In England there are some organisations that specifically provide safe places for Minority Ethnic LGBT people. The Kiss Project in London, is one example. One of the women who attends it explains its importance:

“As I grew up and felt more kind of gay I felt this drifting apart from my culture because I felt I couldn’t be as expressive with my friends, my social circle, and I felt that being gay meant there were no Asian spaces that I could go to and I kind of felt distant, I felt a loss of my culture”. (Kiss, 2005)

In Scotland there are no such specialised services and only small pockets of work have been done with people from ME backgrounds who are LGBT. For a long time questions about levels of need, types of issues faced and best ways of tacking multiple discrimination have remained unanswered.

The EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) has funded the Equality Network to help start finding out the answers to these questions. Since June 2008 we have been working in equal partnership with BEMIS (Black and Ethnic Minority Infrastructure Scotland) in a groundbreaking research project.

There are no organisations in Scotland that target people who are ME/LGBT as one of their main client groups. By contrast there are about 25 mainly small voluntary organisations and projects in England. Late last year we visited eight of these to see how we could learn from their experiences. We discussed the issues and challenges faced by ME/LGBT people and service providers.

We also visited 15 equality organisations across Scotland to find out about their level of knowledge and understanding of the needs of people who are ME/LGBT as well as discussing their ideas for future ways of developing services.

This month we are holding a roundtable event to discuss our findings with both organisations and ME/LGBT people. This will help us firm up our ideas and recommendations for how to take our work forward. A detailed report of our work will be published in the Spring.

For many years people from LGBT communities have campaigned for equality. Real equality only comes if all members of the LGBT community feel safe, respected and able to be ourselves. For people who are ME/LGBT there is still a long way to go – but we hope this project is making a start.  As a direct result of this project, we are already beginning to get people talking about an issue that is normally ignored.

If you are interested in finding out more please contact Tim Cowen or Samantha Rankin of the Equality Network.

Out & Safe

In 1980, Scotland took its first small steps towards LGBT equality with the part-decriminalisation of homosexuality for men over the age of 21. This marked the beginning of the end of the criminalisation of generations of gay men. But the tradition of mistrust between LGBT people and the police had not ended.

Over the next twenty years, there were few steps toward legal and social equality for LGBT people, and during that time for the most part relationships between the police and LGBT people continued to  be strained. However, in 1992, Lothian and Borders police began to work with Outright Scotland – one of the earliest examples of a British police force engaging with an LGBT organisation to build a new relationship between the police and LGBT communities in Scotland.

Nearly 30 years later, the situation is a somewhat different one for LGBT people in Scotland. Most of the laws which criminalised sexual and gender minorities are now gone, and have been replaced with new rights and responsibilities, but there is still much work needed to grow cooperation between the police and LGBT communities.

In Scotland there are new and developing structures within the police working within LGBT communities. The Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland (ACPOS) LGBT reference group, which reports directly to Scotland’s chief police officers, helps formulate policies and gives advice on LGBT issues - the Equality Network and Scottish Transgender Alliance are part of this group. There is also the Scottish branch of the LGBT Police Association which not only works towards better relations between the police service and the LGBT community but also works towards equal opportunities for LGBT employees in the police service.

Out & Safe, now in its second year, promotes wellbeing and safety in our communities and offers support in building new relationships between the police and LGBT people. There is no place for hate crime or discrimination in our society. The Out & Safe event on 28^th February in Elgin will outline what support is available for LGBT people and what the police do to combat hate crime, in particular homophobic/transphobic hate crime. This event will give the LGBT communities an opportunity to voice fears or concerns about crime, personal safety and the police.

A 2002 study of LGBT people across Scotland found that as many as one in four had been physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.  (In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the assault rates were even higher.) But fewer than three hundred cases of homophobic hate crime are reported in Scotland each year. It seems many LGBT people do not report homophobic and transphobic crime to the police. We feel that building sustainable and meaningful relationships between the police and LGBT communities is the most important way of ensuring that crimes are reported. Out & Safe is one step along that road.

Out & Safe: Saturday 28^th February 2009, Cedarwood, 20 Edgar Road, Elgin, Moray.

The BIG LGBT Conversation; Scotland’s Future

The debate about Scotland’s future has been taking place around us for many months, with the Commission on Scottish Devolution reviewing the provisions of the Scotland Act, while in the Government’s National Conversation the people of Scotland discuss Scotland's constitutional future. On Thursday 12^th February, in association with SCVO, the Equality Network will be holding its third event in the BIG LGBT Conversation series: “Devolution? Independence? What is best for LGBT people in Scotland’s Future?

Leading the discussion, a panel of MSPs and LGBT activists will share their views and take questions on the topic of Scotland’s Future. We invite you to join us for what promises to be an interesting evening.

The BIG LGBT Conversation; Scotland’s Future: Thursday 12^th February 2009, 6.30pm, Scottish Storytelling Centre, 43 High Street, Edinburgh

Telling our story 

February 2009 is the fifth anniversary of LGBT History Month in the UK: an annual event to celebrate the lives and achievements of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

Claiming our history, celebrating our present, creating our future!

Our history is a record of legislation making our sexual lives criminal behaviour and our falling in love illegal: and over the past thirty years, it is also a record of the legislative changes towards equality.

Our history is the record of individuals: kings and soldiers, doctors and politicians – James VI, Doctor James Barry, General Hector "Fighting Mac" Macdonald, Doctor Sophia Jex-Blake, Margaret Smith MSP. Our history is also in our individual stories: our experience of our lives as LGBT people in Scotland, an invisible minority. 

Our history is the record of events – the 1974 march through Edinburgh from the first international LGBT rights congress held anywhere in the world, the first LGBT Pride march in Edinburgh in 1995, the first civil partnership celebrated in Queen Margaret’s chapel.

Our history is also found in the absences and silences.

Where young people are taught about the Holocaust, which we remember each year on 20^th January, but are not told that among the Nazi victims were people killed for their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Where the history of human rights in the UK can be taught without touching on any issues such as Labouchère Amendment in 1885, nor the amendment to criminalise sex between women proposed by Frederick Macquisten MP in 1921, nor the Criminal Justice Act (Scotland) in 1980 nor Section 28 of the Local Government Act in 1988.

Where history teachers do not mention the powerful trio of James VI’s favourites, the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Somerset, the Duke of Buckingham; where Doctor Sophia Jex-Blake’s passionate friendships with women will be ignored or presumed to be non-sexual: where Doctor James Barry, known in life as a “lady’s man” will be mentioned only as an example of a woman who “disguised herself as a man” to become a doctor, without touching on the discussion to be had whether Doctor Barry was a lesbian or a trans man.

It is a part of the history of the war memorial at Edinburgh Castle, that for years Ian Christie, a WWII veteran and a member of the Scottish Minorities Group (the first LGBT rights organisation in Scotland) would attend the Remembrance Day ceremony and lay a wreath of red poppies and pink triangles to commemorate the forgotten LGBT dead: this in the years when homosexuality was a court-martial offense in the British military. (After Ian Christie’s death, for some years the tradition was continued by the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, but fell into abeyance in the 1990s.)

Just as Black History Month was begun as a means of ensuring that children did not grow up in ignorance of the history of black and minority ethnic people in the UK, so LGBT History Month was begun to ensure that young people – whatever their sexual orientation, or gender identity – do not grow up in the belief that being LGBT is merely a modern trend.

Recording the stories of the LGBT community in Scotland:  www.ourstoryscotland.org.uk

Edinburgh’s LGBT History: www.livingmemory.org.uk/rememberwhen

The Lesbian Archive and Information Centre: www.womenslibrary.org.uk/collection/laic

New UK Equality Bill

The UK Government is proposing an overhaul of Britain’s anti-discrimination laws. The new Equality Bill was announced in the Queen’s speech in the Westminster Parliament, on 3^rd December.

British equality law covers seven equality ‘strands’: age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, race, religion/belief, and sexual orientation.

However, the current law is different for different strands. Discrimination and harassment at work are banned on grounds of all the strands. Discrimination by providers of goods and services is banned for all strands except age. But harassment by providers of goods and services is currently banned only on grounds of race, gender and gender reassignment.

The Government says that one of the purposes of the Equality Bill is to harmonise the protection given to each strand. This would make the law fairer and simpler.

Public sector equality duty

Public bodies in Britain have a legal duty to take positive steps to eliminate discrimination and harassment, and promote equality, on grounds of race, disability and gender. The duty also covers eliminating discrimination and harassment on grounds of gender reassignment.

This duty is called the ‘public sector equality duty’. It applies to all public bodies including local councils, education authorities, universities and colleges, the NHS, police forces, the Scottish Government and many others.

The duty includes more specific requirements to gather equality data, carry out equality impact assessments, publish race, disability and gender equality schemes, and consult and involve people.

For LGBT people, the most important proposal for the Equality Bill is that this public sector duty will be extended to cover all of the equality strands. Public bodies will be required to take practical and transparent steps to eliminate discrimination and harassment, and promote equality, on grounds of sexual orientation and gender reassignment, alongside the other strands.

This should make a huge difference – at the moment, many public bodies prioritise race, disability and gender equality, and other strands get left behind.

Less than harmonious

However the Government seem unwilling to extend the principle of harmonising the strands to some other areas of the law. They do not plan for the Equality Bill to extend the ban on harassment by providers of goods and services to cover the missing strands, which include sexual orientation.

It seems ridiculous that this harassment is banned on grounds of race, gender and gender reassignment but not on grounds of sexual orientation. The Equality Network’s survey work has uncovered many examples of sexual orientation harassment, including intimidating, hostile and degrading treatment by staff of cafes, bed and breakfasts, health services, schools and prisons.

Transgender protection

There are also gaps in the proposals for the Equality Bill in the protections for transgender people. At present, the ban on discrimination and harassment on grounds of gender reassignment does not cover schools, and the proposed Equality Bill does not correct this.

The Government claim this is not needed, because general legislation for schools requires them to look after all children. The Equality Network believes this is a mistake. Transphobic bullying in schools is a near universal experience for gender variant young people. Sexual orientation discrimination is already banned in schools, and transphobic discrimination should be too.

More broadly, the current ban on transphobic discrimination and harassment at work, and by providers of goods and services, only covers gender reassignment. It does not cover discrimination and harassment against transgender people who do not intend to undergo gender reassignment under medical supervision.

The Equality Network believes that the law should be changed to cover all discrimination and harassment on grounds of gender identity and expression. That way, it would protect against all transphobic discrimination.

What happens next?

The Equality Network, Scottish Transgender Alliance and other LGBT equality organisations will continue to press for improvements to the Equality Bill to cover the missing areas outlined above. We will keep you updated on any progress!

The bill is due to be introduced in the Westminster Parliament in the spring, and should pass by early 2010. However, if Gordon Brown calls an early general election in 2009, the bill will be abandoned. It would then be up to the incoming Government after the election to decide whether to reintroduce it.

Transgender Health

The first Scottish Transgender Alliance (STA) Forum Day was held in Glasgow in October 2008. The STA Forum topic was Transgender Health and the discussions that day explored a range of health topics. The health needs of younger and older trans people were discussed, with participants strongly demanding the development of a child and adolescent gender identity NHS clinic service in Scotland, based on the internationally renowned hormone-blocker protocols developed by the Netherlands. Participants also highlighted the need for counselling services to assist the partners and children of those transgender people who come out later in life.

Particular health service inequalities were identified by Forum participants living in rural areas, by participants with non-binary gender identities and by participants who are disabled as well as transgender. Fertility services and mental health services were identified by participants as needing to significantly improve in provision for transgender people. The unfair postcode lottery of access to assessment, hormones and surgery funding and the logistical problems of having to travel out of Scotland for genital surgery were raised as major concerns.

In November, the Scottish Transgender Alliance also ran two focus groups at the Sandyford in Glasgow on the service provision coordination experiences of trans woman and trans men undergoing genital surgery. Trans men and trans women were concerned about the lack of post-op follow-up support and information both in terms of practical post-operative wound care and monitoring of complications, and also in terms of adjusting to the emotional impact of major genital surgery. Trans men were particularly frustrated by poor communication from the surgical team in London, lack of counselling on surgery options, and the stress of unexpected last minute changes by surgeons of dates and locations for surgery and even the surgical procedure techniques carried out.

The report collating together these consultation findings is currently being finalised and will be launched at the 2009 Scottish Transgender Alliance Seminar. The STA Healthcare Seminar will provide good practice guidance and training on transgender health issues useful for all levels of Scottish health and social care service providers from the NHS, the voluntary sector and local authorities. For more information, please email James on james@equality-network.org

Royal College of Nursing project

Vic Thomas is working with the support of the Royal College of Nursing to develop a portfolio that trans people can use to consider how they see themselves, what resources they would like to access and provide a framework to empower them whilst they consider their gender.

He has been working on this project for over a year as part of the Royal College of Nursing’s Political Leadership Programme, an initiative designed to help nurses develop and influence care provision.

As Vic explains:

“Ideally the portfolio would be suitable for peer support work within the trans community after initial training has been carried out, and would give much needed resources and structure to those who are in more socially isolated and rural areas.

“The trans men and women that have been involved in discussions throughout the portfolios development have given vital feedback and support.

“I recently was lucky enough to have an informal chat with an amazing group of transwomen in Inverness, who with their wisdom and enthusiasm made me keen to try and pilot the scheme in Scotland.

“The Scottish Transgender Alliance has been brilliant in supporting the portfolio and we are both committed to continuing its development in Scotland. I intend to return to Scotland in March and meet with more community members and health professionals. If you feel you would like to contribute to this process, please contact James Morton.”