When It Feels Like We Are Going Backwards

There is something deeply unsettling about watching the world around us change and then, suddenly, watching parts of it seem to change back again. The last few weeks have brought up that familiar feeling that perhaps we are not moving forwards after all. It is a difficult feeling to put into words because it is the accumulation of things, the constant reminders that our lives, our identities and our right to exist comfortably in the world are still being debated by people who do not know us.

In Wales, the Welsh Gender Service has paused referrals for gender affirming surgery and new surgeries while an independent clinical review takes place. The Welsh NHS has described this as a temporary pause and has confirmed that other aspects of gender affirming care continue, but for trans people who have already spent years waiting for healthcare, another period of uncertainty can still feel incredibly heavy. Meanwhile, in Turkey, LGBT organisations and activists have faced raids and arrests as part of a wider crackdown that has been framed by the authorities around ‘protecting family and social values’. Although these are very different situations, with different political and social contexts, for queer and trans people watching from elsewhere, they can still contribute to a familiar emotional response. There is that moment of seeing another headline and thinking, here we go again.

Queer people who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, there is a particular emotional complexity to this. Many of us remember a time when being openly queer could feel much more difficult than it does for some people today.

We remember casual homophobia being treated as humour, the discomfort around openly gay relationships, the lack of representation and the feeling that there were certain parts of ourselves that were safer kept quiet.

Then, slowly, things began to change, same sex marriage became legal, and queer people became more visible. Trans people began to find more representation and community and more of us were able to come out, build relationships, make families and live openly.

That progress became part of our understanding of how the world works. We grew up believing, quite reasonably, that each generation would have a little more freedom than the one before it. We expected the circle to keep getting wider, with more people being able to live openly and safely without having to defend their existence.

Perhaps that is why the current climate can feel so emotionally destabilising. When you have spent years watching something move forwards, you begin to take that movement for granted. You start to believe that certain arguments have been settled. You assume that once people have been given the opportunity to see queer and trans people living ordinary lives, the fear and hostility will gradually disappear. Then something happens that reminds us that social progress is much less straightforward than we would like it to be.

It can be wearing to repeatedly have to remember that our lives are still considered controversial by some people.

We can be perfectly happy in our own lives, surrounded by people who love and accept us, and then a headline can suddenly bring us back to the awareness that there are people elsewhere deciding what our lives should look like. For trans people in particular, there is an additional layer of vulnerability when access to healthcare becomes part of a public debate. Healthcare is deeply personal and having your future discussed in newspapers, on social media and in political spaces can make something that should be private feel strangely exposed.

There is also an emotional toll that comes from constantly having to work out whether something is safe. We learn to read rooms, we notice who is looking, we think about whether it is okay to hold someone’s hand, whether we should correct somebody when they use the wrong pronoun, whether a particular place will be welcoming, whether someone who seems friendly actually is. Many queer people become very good at carrying out these calculations almost without noticing that we are doing them. This is one reason community matters so much.

Queer community has always been about far more than politics, it’s the people who understand something without needing a long explanation.

It is about chosen families and friendships that become every bit as important as biological relationships. It is about the relief of walking into a room and realising that nobody is staring, nobody is asking you to explain yourself and nobody expects you to make yourself smaller so that they can feel comfortable.

There is something remarkable about what queer people have created in the face of exclusion. We have created art, music, literature, clubs, charities, support networks, friendships, families and entire cultures around the simple idea that we deserve somewhere to belong. We have taken experiences that could have left us isolated and turned them into opportunities to find one another.

That diversity within our communities is something worth protecting too. Queer people are not a single group with a single experience. We are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, non binary, intersex, asexual, questioning and many other things. We come from different generations, cultures, backgrounds and political perspectives. Some of us have always known exactly who we are, while others have spent decades finding the language to describe themselves. Some people are deeply connected to queer culture, while others simply want to live their lives without having to think about their identity very much at all.

There can be disagreements between us, and there always will be. That is part of being a community made up of human beings. However, what matters is that we do not allow those differences to convince us that we have nothing in common. There is a real danger in becoming so focused on who belongs within the community that we forget how powerful it is simply to have a community in the first place. When the wider world feels hostile, it becomes even more important that we continue making room for one another.

Perhaps we need to remember that solidarity does not require complete agreement.

We can have different experiences of being queer, or understand gender differently. We can disagree about language, politics and priorities and still recognise the fundamental importance of allowing one another to live with dignity. That is where some of the hope sits.

We cannot guarantee that progress will always be linear. There will be political changes, social backlash and moments when it feels as though we are being asked to fight battles that we thought had already been fought. We cannot control every decision made by governments or every opinion expressed about our communities.We can, however, continue to choose connection.

We can keep creating spaces where people feel welcome, keep checking in with one another, keep celebrating queer joy alongside queer struggle. We can continue to make art, fall in love, build families, tell stories and create lives that would once have seemed impossible to many of us. Perhaps we also need to remember how extraordinary it is that we are here at all.

There are generations of queer people who never had the opportunity to live openly.

There are people who spent their entire lives believing that something fundamental about themselves had to remain hidden. Many of us are living freedoms that previous generations fought incredibly hard to create, and we have a responsibility to recognise that history while continuing to make things better for the people coming after us.

So, when it feels like we are going backwards, perhaps we can allow ourselves to feel the sadness and anger that comes with that without allowing it to become the whole story. We are still creating beautiful, complicated, wonderfully diverse lives. The most hopeful thing about queer community has always been our ability to turn difference into belonging.