Lord Hanson of Flint has announced that the government will accept an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to classify hate crimes targeting LGBT and disabled people as aggravated offences.
Here’s what the letter from Lord Hanson says:
In our manifesto we committed to “protect LGBT+ and disabled people by making all existing strands of hate crime an aggravated offence” …This new clause does just that. Indeed, it goes further and extends the ambit of the racially and religiously aggravated offences in sections 29 to 32 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 not just to cover hostility related to disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity but also hostility motivated by a person’s sex.”
A laudable aim it seems. But the casual use of the acronym LGBT+ conflates Sexual Orientation, a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010, with ‘transgender identity’, a concept which does not exist in the law.
It is right that transphobia, like homophobia, should be properly tackled by the police, but without even the loosest definition of what a transgender identity ‘is’, that simply isn’t possible.
It’s instructive to ask who advised the proposers of this amendment to replace the actual protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment with the nebulous notion of identity. Who benefits from this concept creep?
And to consider why has it been tacked onto LGB? It would be unthinkable to refer to DisabilityT+, or ReligionT+ but the open house of gay rights is expected to welcome all-comers, even if those new arrivals hold views which are antithetical to the homosexuality of its unwilling host.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Lesbians and gay men have long had to deal with heterosexual cosplayers in our spaces. They are hostile to same-sex attraction and attack our community from within.
Is it really our business?
The short answer is no. We are not a trans organisation, just as we are not a disability campaign group, and we would prefer not to be commenting on gender identity at all. But the ubiquitous conflation of LBG with T puts us in a position where any mention we make of the specific rights of gay and bi people is framed as a deliberate snub to the T at best, and an expression of transphobia at worst.
It is time for our law makers to get to grips with the Equality Act 2010 and its nine protected characteristics. They must understand that Sexual Orientation is not an open category and that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals must have the right to campaign when we are discriminated against as a consequence of our same-sex attraction.
Lord Hanson should be alert to the motives of those who seek to obfuscate and complicate and understand too that a consequence of their efforts to introduce impossibly nebulous concepts into law would be that employers, the police and the courts would be tied in impossible to untangle knots. Worse, the real purveyors of hatred could never be prosecuted at all.
Let the T be protected, along with any group that faces disadvantage or discrimination outside of the law. But leave LGB alone to fight our own battles and protect our own rights.
LGB Alliance calls for the disaggregation of LGBTQIA+, in all realms of public life, and we object in the strongest terms to its introduction in law.