In the country where I was born, consensual sexual relations between two adult men remain a criminal offence. A conviction can result in up to three years in prison.
The United Nations has repeatedly called for the law to be repealed. Human rights organisations have documented extortion, arbitrary arrest, forced medical examinations, torture and sexual abuse. There have been reports of people being dismissed from their jobs, driven into forced marriages, subjected to so-called “corrective” rape and pushed towards suicide. Yet the law remains.
It does not remain simply because the government has failed to change it. It remains because it performs a function.
A law does more than determine what happens in a courtroom. It teaches society what is acceptable. When the state criminalises a group of people for forming private, consensual relationships, it sends a message that those people are dangerous, immoral and undeserving of protection. That message travels from legislation into police stations, workplaces, schools, homes and families. Eventually, ordinary people begin to enforce it themselves.
Parents reject their children. Employers dismiss their staff. Neighbours whisper. Strangers threaten. Police officers blackmail. Victims become afraid to report violence because reporting it may expose them to prosecution, humiliation or further abuse. The law creates the danger and then makes it almost impossible for those affected to ask the law for protection.
This is what criminalisation does even when relatively few people are convicted. It gives everyone else permission.
People sometimes speak of “non-traditional family values” as though they arrived recently from somewhere in the West. I sometimes say, partly tongue-in-cheek, that I promote them.
I promote them when I talk to my children about equality, dignity and the freedom to be themselves. I promote them when I challenge people who speak about LGBTQ+ people as though they are dangerous, immoral or somehow less human. I promote them when I say that no child should be frightened of losing their family because of who they are, and that no adult should be forced to construct an entire life around concealment.
I am a heterosexual, cisgender woman. Supporting LGBTQ+ people does not require me to share their experience. It simply requires me to recognise their humanity.
Sometimes I am told that I think this way because I have lived “in the West” for too long. The implication is that equality is something I absorbed abroad and that, somewhere along the way, I became detached from the values of the place where I was born.
But that is not true. I have always been like this. Even as a teenager at school, long before I possessed the vocabulary I have now, I questioned why certain people were treated as inferior simply because they were different. Living in Britain may have given me greater freedom to express these ideas, but it did not create them. I did not need the West to teach me that deliberately humiliating another human being is wrong.
Nor do I believe that dignity, compassion or independent thought belongs to any particular part of the world. The West does not own equality any more than the East owns tradition. These geographical labels are often used to avoid engaging with the substance of an argument. Instead of answering the question—why should consenting adults be criminalised?—it is easier to dismiss the person asking it as someone corrupted by foreign ideas.
One of the most disturbing accusations made against LGBTQ+ people is that homosexuality is somehow connected to paedophilia. The comparison is not merely offensive. It is fundamentally irrational.
A relationship between consenting adults is defined by their mutual capacity to consent. Child sexual abuse is defined by the absence of that capacity. A child cannot consent to a sexual relationship with an adult. That is why it is abuse, regardless of whether the offender identifies as heterosexual, gay or bisexual.
Sexual orientation concerns the adults to whom a person is romantically or sexually attracted. Paedophilia concerns sexual attraction towards children. They are entirely different categories. Conflating them is no more logical than claiming that heterosexual men are attracted to children because some men abuse girls.
Preventing LGBTQ+ adults from living openly does nothing to protect children. In fact, confusing homosexuality with child abuse makes the protection of children more difficult. It replaces serious education about consent, grooming, power and safeguarding with a politically convenient lie.
If the genuine concern were the safety of children, society would teach children about bodily autonomy. It would make it safe for them to report inappropriate behaviour. It would investigate offenders even when they were respected relatives, religious leaders or powerful men. It would not use children as rhetorical shields while silencing the very conversations that might protect them.
There is also something faintly absurd about the fear of “promoting” LGBTQ+ identities. Sexual orientation is not an advertisement, a fashion or a political membership scheme. No amount of discussion about LGBTQ+ people will make a heterosexual person gay, just as generations of compulsory heterosexuality did not make gay people heterosexual.
If sexuality could be created through promotion, LGBTQ+ people could scarcely have existed in societies where they were never represented positively, where same-sex relationships were forbidden and where marriage to someone of the opposite sex was presented as the only possible future. Yet they did exist. They always have.
Nature is not waiting for permission from politics.
What education can change is not a person’s sexual orientation but the conditions in which they come to understand it. It can mean the difference between a child growing up believing that something is fundamentally wrong with them and knowing that they are not alone. It can mean the difference between a parent responding with rejection and responding with love. It can mean the difference between an honest life and a life spent performing someone else’s idea of normality.
Visibility does not create LGBTQ+ people. It allows people who already exist to stop hiding.
The same pattern appears in the way transgender and non-binary people are discussed. People who would never ordinarily express any interest in grammar suddenly insist that referring to one person as “they” is grammatically incorrect.
It is not. Singular “they” has existed in English for centuries. We use it naturally whenever a person’s identity is unknown: “Someone left their phone. I hope they come back for it.” Nobody becomes confused. Nobody demands to know why the sentence contains one person but an apparently plural pronoun. The objection usually appears only when a non-binary person asks for the same word to be used deliberately.
Language has always evolved to describe the people who use it. We learn names we have not heard before. We pronounce unfamiliar surnames. We accept that women may prefer “Ms” to “Miss” or “Mrs.” We alter the way we address someone when they marry, divorce, earn a title or simply tell us what they wish to be called. Most of this requires very little effort. Using someone’s pronouns is the same small act of recognition.
We may make an occasional mistake. That is human. There is a considerable difference, however, between making a mistake and deliberately refusing to recognise someone after they have told us who they are.
Then come the jokes: “I identify as a helicopter,” “I identify as a cat,” or “I identify as twenty years younger.” They are presented as harmless humour, but their purpose is to make transgender and non-binary people appear ridiculous. The joke works only if we first accept its premise—that their identities are as absurd as a human being claiming to be an aircraft.
A transgender person is not claiming to be another species or an inanimate object. Gender identity is a deeply rooted part of a person’s experience of themselves. Comparing that experience with identifying as a helicopter does not contribute anything intelligent to a discussion about biology, medicine, language or law. It simply reduces a human life to a punchline.
I often wonder why it is so difficult to allow people to tell us who they are. We are not being asked to experience the world exactly as they do. We are being asked to accept that another person may understand something about their own internal life that we cannot see from the outside.
As I have explored throughout my previous essays, understanding who we are is rarely a single moment of revelation. We do not wake up one morning with a fully formed identity and a complete explanation of ourselves. It can take a lifetime to separate who we genuinely are from who our families, cultures, relationships and institutions have told us to be.
That journey is difficult even for people whose identity is never publicly questioned. Imagine undertaking it while strangers insist that your conclusions are fraudulent, fashionable or ridiculous.
A person does not choose to experience gender incongruence because it looks easy. Transgender people may face rejection by their families, bullying at school, discrimination at work, difficulty accessing healthcare, social isolation and significant financial consequences. Some lose their homes, relationships or employment. Nobody chooses those consequences for entertainment, attention or fashion. They endure them because continuing to live as someone they are not can be more painful still.
The precise development of gender identity is complex, and science does not reduce it to one simple biological cause. Evidence suggests that biological, developmental and environmental factors may all play a part. But complexity does not mean invention, and uncertainty about precisely how identity develops does not make that identity a choice. We do not need to locate a single gene or brain structure before deciding that a person deserves dignity.
Transgender people already have to negotiate the relationship between their bodies, identities and the way society perceives them. The last thing they need is a society determined to add shame, ridicule and punishment to that experience. The consequences are not only emotional and psychological. Rejection can affect education, employment, housing, healthcare, relationships and financial security. Words become conditions, and those conditions shape real lives.
Living in the West has also taught me that this cruelty is not confined to the part of the world where I was born. LGBTQ+ people are vilified here too. The language may be more legalistic and the political arguments may take a different form, but transgender people are still repeatedly discussed as problems to be solved rather than human beings trying to live.
In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the terms “woman,” “man” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex for the purposes of that legislation. The Court expressly said that its role was limited to interpreting the Act. It did not rule on every social or philosophical question concerning sex and gender, and it confirmed that transgender people remain protected from discrimination under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.
Nevertheless, judgments do not exist in a vacuum. The language used around them can influence how people believe they are entitled to treat others.
For many transgender people, the public response sounded less like a technical discussion about statutory interpretation and more like a national debate about whether their identities were real. Some people celebrated the judgment as though transgender people had been defeated. That response matters. A legal decision may be carefully confined to the meaning of particular words in a particular statute, but its social consequences depend on how politicians, newspapers, institutions and the public choose to use it.
Even toilets have become political battlegrounds. Toilets are ordinary facilities that every human being needs to use. Questions about privacy and safety can be addressed through thoughtful design, private cubicles, clear policies and appropriate safeguarding. They do not require the public humiliation of an entire group of people.
When every visit to a toilet becomes a test of whether someone looks sufficiently male or female, many people are endangered—not only transgender people. Masculine-looking women, feminine-looking men and anyone who does not conform neatly to gendered expectations may be challenged. The attempt to police transgender bodies inevitably teaches us to police everyone’s body.
Imagine being a transgender child watching the news. Imagine hearing adults argue day after day about whether people like you are real, whether acknowledging you will endanger other children, which toilet you should be permitted to use and whether teachers should call you by the name through which you recognise yourself. Imagine hearing people laugh about identities like yours and then being expected to go to school and feel safe among children who have heard the same jokes.
Adults may experience these conversations as politics. A child experiences them personally.
That child did not create a national controversy. They did not choose to become the subject of newspaper headlines, election campaigns or courtroom arguments. They are trying to understand themselves while the world publicly debates whether accepting them is dangerous.
We should be able to discuss difficult questions about law, medicine, sport, safeguarding and single-sex services. Compassion does not prohibit careful discussion, and the rights of different groups sometimes require thoughtful balancing. But a serious discussion begins by recognising that the people affected are human beings. It does not begin with ridicule, deliberate humiliation or the assumption that transgender people are inherently deceptive or threatening.
These words and laws have consequences. They influence whether a parent embraces a child or rejects them, whether a teacher intervenes in bullying or quietly permits it, whether an employer sees a capable person or a complication, and whether someone feels safe enough to ask for medical or psychological support.
Why is it so difficult to accept people as they are and allow them to express who they are? Their 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 body. Another person’s existence is not an argument against my own.
Transgender and non-binary people did not choose the internal experience that makes their lives more difficult in a hostile world. They should not also be punished for it.
It is painful. It is unfair. Most of all, it is unnecessary.
We could respond differently. We could listen before judging. We could distinguish genuine safeguarding from manufactured panic. We could stop converting human difference into entertainment and political capital. We could remember that behind every pronoun, court judgment and newspaper headline is a real person who has already travelled a long way simply to say: this is who I am.
The least society can do is allow them to finish the sentence.
History also makes the idea that homosexuality was recently imported from the West impossible to sustain. Same-sex love and desire existed long before modern Western human-rights organisations, social media or Pride marches. They appear across different periods, religions and civilisations, including in societies that had little or no contact with the modern West. They are present in literature, poetry, art, medical writing, court records and private correspondence.
What has changed is not the sudden creation of LGBTQ+ people. What has changed is that some people are now able to name themselves and refuse to disappear.
When silence is compulsory, absence proves very little. People learn to hide. They invent romantic histories. They monitor their movements, voices and clothing. They avoid doctors and police officers. They enter marriages because there is no safe alternative. They live two lives, or no real life at all. Some leave their countries. Some are discovered. Some do not survive the shame, fear and isolation imposed upon them.
When a few finally speak, society asks where they have suddenly come from. They have not suddenly appeared. They have become visible.
This is why the expression “non-traditional values” is so misleading. LGBTQ+ people are not new. What is genuinely traditional in many societies is not heterosexuality itself, but the suppression of anyone who did not fit the officially permitted version of it.
The supposedly traditional solution has often been concealment. It has meant gay men marrying women because they had no other safe choice. It has meant women spending their lives with husbands who could never love them in the way either of them deserved. It has meant frightened children, secret relationships, invented identities and entire families built around something nobody was permitted to say aloud.
There is nothing wholesome about compelling human beings to construct a family around fear. There is nothing sacred about preserving the outward appearance of a marriage while sacrificing every person inside it.
If “non-traditional family values” means believing that families should be formed through honesty, consent, love and genuine choice, then I am quite comfortable promoting them.
Religion is also frequently invoked. People say that homosexuality is prohibited in Islam and believe this ends the conversation. But the relationship between scripture, interpretation and state punishment is not that simple.
The verses most frequently discussed concern the people of Lut. Traditional Islamic scholarship has generally interpreted these passages as condemning same-sex sexual acts. Some contemporary scholars offer different readings, arguing that the story is centrally concerned with rape, coercion, humiliation, violence and the abuse of strangers rather than loving, consensual relationships between adults.
We do not need to pretend that centuries of traditional Islamic jurisprudence did not exist. It did, and much of it regarded same-sex sexual acts as sinful. But believing that something is religiously prohibited does not automatically give individuals or governments the right to imprison, expose, assault or humiliate another person.
Religious people live alongside conduct their faith does not permit every day. Islam prohibits alcohol, adultery, gossip, arrogance, dishonesty, spying and cruelty. Yet a Muslim who believes drinking alcohol is sinful is not required to attack everyone who drinks. Nor is every private sin treated as a matter for police surveillance and imprisonment.
The Qur’an repeatedly returns ultimate judgment to God. It says there is no compulsion in religion. It warns believers against suspicion, spying and backbiting. It commands justice even when justice is difficult, and it speaks repeatedly of mercy. Whatever a person’s theological position on same-sex relationships, none of these principles requires cruelty.
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 help the state enter your bedroom. I will not deny you employment, medical treatment, safety or the protection of the law. Your relationship with God belongs to you. My responsibility is for my own conduct.
I understand something about the language used to control people because women have heard versions of it for centuries.
Women were told that obedience was natural, dependence was protection and silence was virtue. We were told that education would corrupt us, independence would destroy the family and freedom would make us immoral. Violence inside the home was treated as a private matter, while a woman who departed from her prescribed role was treated as a danger to society. Much of this was defended in the name of religion, culture, biology and tradition.
Minorities have heard the same arguments. They have been described as disloyal, dangerous, morally inferior or incapable of deciding what is best for themselves. The details change, but the template remains remarkably consistent.
First, those in authority define what is normal. Then they identify a group that supposedly threatens it. They connect that group to danger, foreign influence, immorality or harm to children. They repeat the association until ordinary people begin to believe it. After that, the authorities no longer need to perform all the repression themselves. Families, neighbours, employers, teachers and strangers will do it for them.
All that is required from above is an idea. We carry out the punishment below.
We reject our own children. We force people into marriages. We spread rumours, deny employment, overlook violence and treat cruelty as moral courage. We make people so frightened of exposure that they cannot seek help when they are assaulted or blackmailed. We call this the defence of society without noticing that we are the ones tearing society apart.
That is the absurdity at the centre of it. We believe we are protecting ourselves from an invented enemy while actively harming our own families, friends, colleagues and children. The LGBTQ+ person we are taught to fear is not an abstract figure imported from the West. They may be our brother, sister, son or daughter. They may be the doctor who treats us, the teacher who educates our children or the neighbour who helps our mother carry her shopping home.
We are not protecting the family when we make children afraid to tell their parents who they are. We are not protecting marriage when we force people to marry partners they cannot love. We are not protecting religion when we use it to excuse humiliation and violence. We are not protecting society when some of its members can be blackmailed with the knowledge that the police may punish the victim instead of the offender.
We are harming ourselves.
The political purpose of this deserves particular attention. Authoritarian governments frequently need enemies. An invented threat directs public anger away from corruption, inequality, unemployment, failing institutions and the absence of political freedom. It is much safer for those in power if people blame a small, vulnerable minority for the decline of society instead of asking why public wealth is disappearing or why criticism of the government is dangerous.
Russian state propaganda has become particularly effective at this. The government presents itself as the defender of religion, children and “traditional civilisation” against a supposedly corrupt West. LGBTQ+ people become convenient symbols of foreign contamination, while censorship and political repression are repackaged as moral protection.
That narrative does not remain within Russia’s borders. It travels through television, social media, political networks and the shared cultural space of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Ideas are repeated so frequently that they begin to sound like ancient cultural truths, even when they are serving a modern political purpose.
The strategy works because it keeps our attention horizontal. We scrutinise one another’s clothes, relationships, prayers, identities and private lives. We argue about who is sufficiently traditional, sufficiently masculine, sufficiently modest or sufficiently patriotic. While we are fighting among ourselves, we are not asking why our institutions fail us, why corruption survives, why wealth remains concentrated at the top or why criticism of those in power is treated as disloyalty.
The people at the top do not need to silence every citizen individually. It is much more efficient to teach citizens to silence one another.
This is not limited to LGBTQ+ people. The same structure has been used against women, ethnic and religious minorities, migrants, disabled people, political dissidents and anyone portrayed as an obstacle to national purity or social order. The accusations differ, but the political formula remains the same: exaggerate difference, manufacture fear, remove sympathy and allow the majority to mistake participation in oppression for membership in the protected group.
But the protected group is never truly protected. Its membership can always be narrowed. Today, the target may be a gay man. Tomorrow, it may be an unmarried woman, a journalist, an artist, a religious minority, a person who dresses differently or anyone accused of carrying foreign ideas. Once we accept that difference deserves punishment, none of us can know when our own difference will become politically useful.
A government that teaches us to hate one another does not make us stronger. It makes us easier to govern.
Acceptance does not require universal agreement. People will continue to have different religious convictions, moral beliefs and understandings of family. A free society is not one in which everyone thinks alike. It is one in which disagreement does not deprive another human being of safety, privacy and equal protection under the law.
Decriminalisation is not an endorsement of a particular way of life. It is the recognition that the criminal law should not enter a private relationship between consenting adults. Equal rights do not grant LGBTQ+ people special privileges. They mean that no one 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 religion provides meaning without becoming a weapon. I promote a society in which people can disagree about morality without demanding that the police enter somebody else’s bedroom.
Yet there is nothing new about any of this. LGBTQ+ people are not a modern invention. Same-sex love did not arrive with Western charities, films or social media. Transgender and non-binary people did not appear when we found better words with which to describe their experiences. They have always existed. What is new—or at least still painfully unfinished—is the possibility of living openly without punishment.
The deeper question is not whether we approve of every life another person may lead. None of us needs universal approval in order to exist. The question is whether we recognise another human being’s right to safety, dignity, privacy and equal protection under the law.
It could be different. We could refuse to confuse disagreement with danger. We could protect children by teaching them about consent instead of teaching them to hate. We could allow religious conviction to coexist with mercy and restraint. We could stop forcing people into false lives and then congratulating ourselves on preserving appearances.
Most importantly, we could recognise the political trick being played upon us. We could stop searching for enemies beside us and begin asking who benefits from our fear. We could refuse to perform the work of oppression on behalf of those who govern us.
The freedom of LGBTQ+ people is not separate from the freedom of everyone else. It tests whether we genuinely believe in human dignity, or only in dignity for people who resemble us.
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.
And 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.
UnlearningSilence.blog 