Is LGBTQ+ Acceptance Going Backwards?

When Acceptance Turns Out to Have Been on Loan

So here is the strange, low-grade nausea of being a gay man in Britain this Pride season: I am married, I have two sons, I can hold my husband’s hand on most streets without doing the old reflexive scan — and I still feel the floor moving.

Acceptance was never a possession we earned and got to keep; it turns out it was a loan, and lenders can call in a loan. That is the thing the cheerful version of gay history never quite tells you. We talk about progress as if it were a ratchet — clicks forward, never back. But a ratchet is a machine, and rights are not. Rights are a settlement, and settlements can be reopened by whoever fancies their chances at the negotiating table next.

And right now there are a lot of people fancying their chances.

I grew up under a law that said I shouldn’t exist out loud

I went through school under Section 28 — the Local Government Act clause that, from 1988, banned the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities and, in practice, gagged teachers from saying anything affirming about gay people at all. It wasn’t repealed in England and Wales until 2003.

You absorb a law like that without ever reading it. A child doesn’t need to see the statute to learn the lesson the statute teaches: that there is something about you the adults have agreed not to name. I was scared to tell anyone I was gay — not because anyone had threatened me, exactly, but because I’d already concluded I would be a disappointment to everyone around me. That was the felt sense. Whether it was strictly true almost didn’t matter; the fear did its work either way.

And here is what nobody warns you about: that wiring doesn’t fully uninstall. It quietens. It goes dormant. And then a news cycle comes along and you find your hand doing the old scan again.

What “things got better” actually felt like

For a long stretch, though, the news ran the other way, and it was genuinely something to watch.

We won the right to adopt. We won relationships the law would actually recognise: civil partnerships, then marriage. And I watched people change their minds in real time — the same ones who’d have flinched in 1995 turning up to our wedding in 2011.

I am, concretely, a beneficiary of every one of those fights. My family is legal because people I never met refused to accept the previous settlement. So I don’t say any of the following from a place of despair, or because I think the gains were fake. They were real. They’re the ground I’m standing on.

I just no longer think the ground is bedrock. I think it’s a tenancy.

The bit where they come for one of us to soften up the rest

Here’s the pattern that keeps me up. The current backlash isn’t testing whether trans people can be pushed back out of public life — it’s testing whether anyone can, with trans people as the place they’ve chosen to start.

That’s not solidarity-flavoured rhetoric; it’s how coalitions get unpicked. You find the part of the group with the least institutional cover and the most public confusion around it, you make that the acceptable thing to be loud about, and you watch which protections turn out to be load-bearing for everyone else. The writing isn’t on the wall in code. It’s in pretty large letters.

And this Pride, the letters got larger. Reform UK councillors in Essex moved to bar libraries from promoting Pride and LGBTQ+ events through council channels, while in Warwickshire a Reform council leader called for trans-related books to be pulled from library shelves, prompting a formal complaint from Warwickshire Pride. And on the same council, Wayne Briggs — the Reform councillor who holds the brief for children, education and SEND, of all the portfolios to hand it to — wrote in a leaked email that Pride had been “hijacked by groomers and mentally ill men in dresses” and called it “dangerous ideology”. Reported to the police, he declined to apologise and said he stood by it.

When the ambulance stops turning up

The detail that genuinely got to me was a quieter one. This year the London Ambulance Service pulled back its support for the London Pride march — no operational vehicle in the parade, staff asked not to attend in full uniform — citing a need for political neutrality after a 2025 court ruling.

And here’s the tell. The ambulance chief executives’ own body, AACE, has said that ruling doesn’t bind ambulance services at all — it applies to police duties and has no bearing on the rest. So the “neutrality” wasn’t compelled by the law; it was read into the law by someone who fancied the conclusion. When a rule doesn’t require a retreat and you retreat anyway, the neutrality isn’t neutral — it’s an ideology wearing a hi-vis jacket, choosing the reading that quietly takes a side.

It sounds procedural. It isn’t. An emergency service marching in uniform was never about the float; it was a public, institutional sentence that said: we see you, and we are not embarrassed to be seen with you. Withdrawing it sends the opposite sentence, and the people cheering loudest are precisely the ones who never wanted it said in the first place. A small administrative retreat reads, to a homophobe, as a win. They’re not wrong to read it that way.

Why a news story can land in your chest

If you’ve felt the last few years as a physical thing — the tightness, the scanning, the disproportionate ache at a paragraph about a parade — that is not you being fragile or over-invested in politics.

The mechanism has a name: minority stress — the chronic, additional load of living under a stigmatised identity, layered on top of ordinary life stress, and it operates whether or not anything has happened to you personally. Ilan Meyer’s work maps it as two streams: distal stressors (the actual events — the policy, the councillor, the withdrawn ambulance) and proximal ones (what those events switch back on inside you — the vigilance, the bracing, the half-expectation of rejection you thought you’d outgrown).

So when a Reform press release lands in your body, you’re not catastrophising. You’re an organism that learned, early and well, to treat exactly this signal as dangerous — and is now being proven, irritatingly, a bit right.

Watching Tip Toe and knowing who won’t

Russell T Davies’ Tip Toe aired on Channel 4 this May — two Manchester neighbours, a gay bar owner and the bloke next door, curdling into deadly enemies as online anti-LGBTQ feeling does its slow poison. It’s harrowing in the specific way Davies is good at: not cartoon villainy, just an ordinary man radicalised one plausible step at a time.

And the thing I can’t shake is that the people who most need to sit with it are the least likely to press play. That’s not despair talking. It’s just the maths of who watches what.

So what do you actually do with this

I don’t have a tidy bow, and I’m suspicious of anyone offering one. What I’ve landed on is closer to a posture than a plan.

• Hold the receipts. Know specifically what was fought for and won — Section 28’s repeal, adoption, marriage — because rights that feel eternal are the easiest to lose quietly. You can’t defend a settlement you’ve forgotten was ever in doubt.
• Treat trans rights as the wall, not the window. If they come for one of us to find out whether they can come for any of us, the answer they’re looking for is yes, easily — and the way you make the answer no is to refuse the separation entirely.
• Take the vigilance seriously without letting it become your whole nervous system. Naming minority stress as a mechanism is the point: it’s a load you can manage, share, and put down between rounds — not a verdict on your resilience.

I remember the bad version of this country. I also watched it become a better one, with my own family as the evidence. Both of those are true at once, which is exactly why I’m not prepared to assume the better version is permanent.

It was a loan. Mind it carefully.