UnlearningSilence.blog

In dozens of countries, private sexual relationships between consenting adults remain crimes when the adults happen to be of the same sex. The penalties differ, but the message is much the same: these people are not merely disapproved of. They are considered undeserving of the privacy and protection everyone else expects.

A law does more than determine what happens in a courtroom. It teaches society whom it is permitted to mistreat. When the state criminalises a group of people for their private relationships, the message travels far beyond the police station. Parents reject their children. Employers dismiss staff. Neighbours whisper. Strangers threaten. Victims become afraid to report violence because asking for protection may expose them to prosecution, humiliation or blackmail.

This is what criminalisation achieves even when few people are convicted. It gives everyone else permission.

People often speak of “non traditional values” as though LGBTQ+ people arrived recently from somewhere else, carrying a collection of suspicious foreign ideas. I sometimes say, partly in jest, that I promote those values. I promote families in which children are not frightened of losing their parents’ love. I promote relationships entered through honesty and choice. I promote homes in which nobody must construct an entire life around concealment.

Apparently, this is quite radical.

Supporting LGBTQ+ people does not require me to share their experience or understand every part of it. It requires only the recognition that another person’s life is as real to them as mine is to me. Dignity is not a Western invention, and cruelty does not become culture merely because it has been practised for a long time.

Geography is often used to avoid the substance of the argument. Instead of answering the question, “Why should consenting adults be imprisoned?” it is easier to accuse the person asking it of importing foreign values. Yet same sex love existed long before modern charities, social media and Pride marches. It appears across periods, religions and civilisations in poetry, art, medical writing, court records and private letters. LGBTQ+ people did not suddenly appear when language became available to describe them. They became easier to see.

When silence is compulsory, absence proves very little. People learn to hide. They invent romantic histories, monitor their movements and enter marriages because no safe alternative exists. Some live two lives. Others never have the opportunity to live one honestly. When a few finally speak, society asks where they have suddenly come from.

They have not suddenly come from anywhere. They have stopped disappearing.

This is why the expression “non traditional family values” is so misleading. What has often been traditional is not universal heterosexuality, but compulsory concealment. Gay men have married women they could not love as either of them deserved. Women have spent their lives inside marriages built around a truth nobody was permitted to say aloud. Children have learned that belonging depends upon performance.

There is nothing wholesome about compelling people to construct families around fear. There is nothing sacred about preserving the appearance of a marriage while sacrificing everyone inside it.

Another familiar argument connects homosexuality with child abuse. The comparison is not only offensive. It is intellectually incoherent. A relationship between adults is defined by their capacity to consent. Sexual abuse of a child is defined by the absence of that capacity. A child cannot consent to a sexual relationship with an adult, regardless of the adult’s sexual orientation.

If the genuine concern were protecting children, society would teach them about bodily autonomy, consent, grooming and power. It would make it safe for them to report inappropriate behaviour, even when the offender was a relative, religious leader or respected member of the community. It would not replace safeguarding with a convenient lie about gay people.

There is also something faintly absurd about the fear of “promoting” homosexuality. Sexual orientation is not an advertising campaign. No amount of discussion about gay people will make a heterosexual person gay, just as generations of compulsory heterosexuality did not make gay people straight. If relentless promotion could determine sexuality, there would be no LGBTQ+ people at all.

Nature is not waiting for permission from politics.

What education can change is not sexual orientation, but the conditions in which a person comes to understand it. It can mean the difference between growing up convinced that something is fundamentally wrong with you and knowing that you are not alone. It can mean the difference between a parent responding with rejection and responding with love. Visibility does not create LGBTQ+ people. It allows people who already exist to stop hiding.

The same refusal to recognise another person appears in discussions about transgender and non binary people. Those who have never shown much interest in grammar suddenly become passionate defenders of it when asked to use the singular “they.” Yet English speakers use that form constantly. “Someone left their phone. I hope they return for it.” Nobody collapses under the grammatical strain.

We learn unfamiliar names. We make an effort with surnames. We change how we address someone when they marry, divorce, earn a title or simply tell us what they prefer to be called. Using a person’s pronouns is another small act of recognition. Mistakes happen. There is a considerable difference between making one and deliberately refusing to acknowledge someone after they have told us who they are.

Then come the jokes about identifying as a helicopter, a cat or a younger person. They are presented as harmless humour, but the joke works only if a transgender identity is first accepted as equally absurd. A transgender person is not claiming to be an aircraft or another species. Reducing a human life to a punchline contributes nothing intelligent to discussions about biology, medicine, language or law. It merely allows ridicule to dress itself as argument.

Understanding identity can take a lifetime even when nobody publicly questions it. We all spend years separating who we are from the person our family, culture, relationships and institutions expected us to become. Imagine undertaking that work while strangers insist that whatever you discover must be fraudulent, fashionable or ridiculous.

No single scientific explanation is required before dignity becomes available. Human identity is complex. Complexity does not mean invention, and uncertainty about how an experience develops does not make it a choice. A person should not have to produce a gene, scan or medical theory before being treated with ordinary decency.

Bathrooms have somehow become political battlefields. Privacy and safety matter, but they can be addressed through sensible design, private facilities, clear rules and proper safeguarding. They do not require the public humiliation of an entire group. Once society begins inspecting whether people look sufficiently male or female to enter a toilet, everyone whose appearance falls outside a narrow expectation becomes vulnerable to challenge.

The attempt to police transgender bodies teaches us to police everybody’s body.

Imagine being a child listening to adults argue about whether people like you are real, whether acknowledging you threatens other children, which toilet you should use and whether teachers should call you by the name through which you recognise yourself. Adults may experience these arguments as politics. A child experiences them as a judgment on whether there is a place for them in the world.

Difficult questions about law, medicine, sport, safeguarding and services can be discussed carefully. Compassion does not prohibit serious thought, and rights may sometimes require balancing. But a serious discussion begins by recognising that those affected are human beings. It does not begin with ridicule or the assumption that an entire group is inherently deceptive or dangerous.

Another person’s identity takes nothing away from mine. Calling someone “they” does not make me less of a woman. A transgender person living openly does not weaken my rights, my family or my relationship with my own body. Another person’s existence is not an argument against my own.

Religion is also invoked as though it brings every discussion to an immediate end. People are entitled to their beliefs about sexual morality. But believing that something is sinful does not create a duty to imprison, expose, assault or humiliate another person.

Religious people live beside conduct their faith does not permit every day. Most religions prohibit far more than same sex relationships. They speak against dishonesty, arrogance, cruelty, gossip, betrayal and the private failures familiar to almost everyone. Yet believers are not required to investigate every neighbour, expose every private transgression or invite the police into every home.

It is possible to hold a traditional religious belief and still say: I will not humiliate you. I will not harm you. I will not deny you work, healthcare, safety or the protection of the law. Your relationship with God belongs to you. My responsibility is for my own conduct.

The language used against LGBTQ+ people is familiar because many groups have heard versions of it before. Women were told that obedience was natural, dependence was protection and silence was virtue. Education would corrupt them. Independence would destroy the family. Freedom would make them immoral. Much of this was defended in the names of religion, culture, biology and tradition.

The details change, but the method is reliable. First, those with authority define what is normal. Then they identify a group said to threaten it. That group is connected to foreign influence, immorality or danger to children. The association is repeated until ordinary people begin enforcing it themselves.

The authorities no longer need to perform all the punishment. Families, neighbours, employers and strangers will do it for them.

We reject our own children. We force people into marriages. We spread rumours, overlook violence and treat cruelty as moral courage. We make people so afraid of exposure that they cannot seek help when assaulted or blackmailed. We call this the defence of society while tearing society apart ourselves.

The LGBTQ+ person presented as an abstract threat may be a brother, sister, colleague, doctor, teacher or neighbour. We are not protecting families when children are afraid to tell their parents who they are. We are not protecting marriage when people are forced to marry partners they cannot love. We are not protecting religion when it becomes an excuse for humiliation. We are not protecting society when victims fear the police more than their abusers.

We are harming ourselves.

There is also a political usefulness to all this. Governments that cannot offer prosperity, security or freedom often find it convenient to offer an enemy. Public anger is directed towards a vulnerable minority rather than corruption, inequality and failing institutions. Citizens begin scrutinising one another’s clothes, relationships, identities and private lives instead of asking what those in power are doing.

The people at the top do not need to silence every citizen individually. It is more efficient to teach citizens to silence one another.

This method is not limited to LGBTQ+ people. It has been used against women, ethnic and religious minorities, migrants, disabled people, political opponents and anyone portrayed as an obstacle to purity or order. Today, the target may be a gay man. Tomorrow, it may be an unmarried woman, a journalist, an artist or anyone accused of carrying the wrong ideas. Once difference becomes sufficient reason for punishment, none of us knows when our own difference may become useful.

A government that teaches people to hate one another does not make them stronger. It makes them easier to govern.

Acceptance does not require universal agreement. People will continue to hold different religious convictions and ideas about family, sex and gender. A free society is not one in which everyone thinks alike. It is one in which disagreement does not deprive another person of safety, privacy and equal protection under the law.

Decriminalisation is not an instruction to approve of every private life. It is the recognition that criminal law should not enter a consensual relationship between adults. Equal rights are not special privileges. They mean that nobody should be assaulted, blackmailed, dismissed, imprisoned or driven from their family because of who they are.

Perhaps I do promote “non traditional family values.” I promote families in which children do not have to earn love by pretending to be someone else. I promote marriages entered through choice rather than fear. I promote homes in which faith offers meaning without becoming a weapon. I promote a society in which people may disagree about morality without demanding that the police enter somebody else’s bedroom.

What, exactly, is so non traditional about love, honesty, mercy and protecting one’s children?

No amount of “promotion” will make someone gay or transgender. It may, however, make someone less afraid. It may help a child understand that they are not broken. It may help a parent choose love over rejection. It may make one family more honest and one society less cruel.

The freedom of LGBTQ+ people is not separate from anyone else’s freedom. It tests whether we believe in human dignity or merely in dignity for people who resemble us.

When we reject our children, destroy our families and turn against our neighbours in defence of an idea planted from above, those at the top do not need to destroy us.

We do it for them.