ROUGH SEAS AHEAD?

The Rainbow Project is well known throughout Northern Ireland for the services we provide to the LGBTQIA+ community. Across our sexual health advice and testing; to our mental health support; hate crime and BAME advocacy; and co-cultural counselling, we work hard to mitigate the impacts discrimination and inequality has on all our lives.

But while we work to mitigate the impact of discrimination, our bigger, and arguably more challenging job is to eliminate the need for that mitigation in the first place.

As LGBTQIA+ people we don’t suffer poorer mental health outcomes because we are gay, its because of homophobia. We aren’t socially isolated where we live because we are bi, its because of biphobia. We don’t face rising instances of hate crime and violence because we are trans, it’s because of transphobia. The most important thing we as an LGBTQIA+ organisation can do is to work for full social and legal equality for LGBTQIA+ people, to ensure the much-needed and in demand services we provide now, aren’t needed in the future.

I think it’s fair to say on LGBTQIA+ equality we’ve never been ahead of the game here in Northern Ireland. We were the last part of the UK to partially decriminalise same-sex activity in 1982, and the last part again to introduce same-sex marriage in 2020. When it comes to making progress on LGBTQIA+ issues very little of it has come from Stormont.

That has to change. The inclusion of a sexual orientation question in the census for the first time in 2021 has confirmed something we already knew. Its confirmed there are people like us in every part of Northern Ireland, from Enniskillen to Ballycastle, Newry to Derry. We are neighbours, family members, parents, pupils, CEOs and MLAs. We are here, and where we once always had to follow we now have the opportunity to not always be last, but to lead.

As we once again see more protestors at our pride events; inclusive RSE in our schools branded as ‘deviant’; drag story time and family events blockaded; and our LGBTQIA+ organisations facing levels of abuse and threat not seen since the 80s, we need to not just ask for better from our politicians, we must demand it.

At a time when one of the direct consequences of the increase in anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment has been a significant rise in the reporting of hate crime, progress on improved

LGBTQIA+ inclusive hate crime laws have stalled at Stormont.

At a time when the increasingly fork-tongued narrative is of LGBTQIA+ people as the perpetrators of conversion therapy rather than its victims and survivors, we are making slower progress than needed on comprehensively banning so called conversion therapy across these islands.

At a time when increasingly hostile anti-trans narratives, which by the way look almost identical to the anti-gay narratives of the 70s & 80s, are being shipped across the Irish Sea in the red lane, all the lessons of progressive gender recognition laws in multiple jurisdictions including our nearest neighbour to the south, have not been learned.

The next few weeks and months are a critical time for LGBTQIA+ people across Northern Ireland. As an organisation we are making the case for inclusive RSE in Schools against an increasingly vocal opposition where facts mean very little. We’re making the case for improved hate crime laws that ensure that all parts of our community are protected. We are making the case for the implementation of the LGBTQIA+ strategy which has languished on the shelves in Stormont for too long; and we are making the case for a comprehensive ban on so called conversion therapy, without loopholes that would render it useless.

We do all these things with our partners in NI like HEReNI and Cara-Friend, and our partners across UK and Ireland like LGBT Ireland and Stonewall. As we seek progress in a challenging environment it’s important that everyone who believes in progress for LGBTQIA+ people work together.

As we fight for full social and legal equality across Northern Ireland we need you too. There may be rough seas ahead, but only if we work together can we make progress together.