Transgender Day of Remembrance

Because the dead should not be forgotten

Aaargh, rage beyond words

I can’t watch most “It Gets Better” videos because they put me in a bad bad place. But I like them, I like that they exist – ye gods I love that they exist. Mainly, beyond any kind of logic or thought, I like them because I think back the to 10, 14, 16… gods any age before 18-year old me and know how much this would have meant to me. Just how incredibly wonderful and treasured just one of those videos would have been and what it would have meant for little messed up me.

Of course, those same issues have kept me around the fringes, being unable to make a video or tell my own story or to watch many of those that have been posted without going into a big storm of Do-Not-Wantness. But still I’ve been following from the fringes and seeing some of what was posted.

Politicians making them? Hmmm less impressed. It feels like bandwagon jumping. It feels like election campaigning. It feels like gesture politics – you know the kind “We’re not actually going to do anything substantial to give you equal rights – but here, have a pretty speech. And I’ll walk in the pride parade and, yay, make an It Gets Better Video. But I’m not actually going to do shit.”

If you’re a politician, especially from parties that are in power, why are you making a vid telling us it gets better? YOU should be making it better, NOW.

Which then brings me to an ultimate “oh you did not” and even a “fuck this I’m done!” moment.

Because David Cameron and Theresa freaking May have made It Gets Better videos.

I am not impressed. And not just because both videos contain so much “this government” and “we have done” that they may as well decked it in blue and called it a campaign vid. It was sickening to watch them milk this as much as they could for votes and attention, for rainbow-washing and gesture politics. I was literally hurting I was so furious to see something like this project being used this way.

But, no this is even sicker than that.

If you’re not GBLTQ and British you may not know what “section 28” means. If you are both those things I can almost guarantee you do and that you probably started swearing

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was a Tory law that FORBADE Local Authorities AND schools from saying positive things about homosexuality. You couldn’t even say it was acceptable and certainly not that it was a familial relationship. It was illegal to mention homosexuality in a positive light when I was in school. If I had gone to my teachers about the crap I was going through. Gay Straight Alliances? Hell no, none of that, there was a freaking LAW!

It was repealed in 2003. After numerous attempts – NUMEROUS attempts – to push it through by the Labour government that the Tories fought tooth and nail against.

In 2000 David Cameron said “”fringe agenda… including deeply unpopular moves like repealing Section 28 and allowing the promotion of homosexuality in schools”.

In 2003 David Cameron himself tried to protect the law via amendment of the repeal bill. He was absent for the actual vote to repeal it.

And as for Theresa May – our Equalities minister (HAH!) her voting record is among the worst of all MPs

Like Cameron, she was carefully absent in 2003 when the repeal was passed. She was present and voted AGAINST repeal in 2000.
Here is a quote from her on section 28 before the 2003 repeal

What we’re looking for fundamentally is protection of children and certainly obviously we’re reviewing all our policies and we will look at the issue of section 28. And what we’ll be looking to ensure is that if repeal were proposed what would be put in its place because what we want to ensure at all times is protection of children

She’s concerned about the protection of children – not our bullied children, but no, what will happen to children if repeal the law and allow the gayness into the classroom. She goes on to say that she thinks the law was NECESSARY. Really this picture sums it up

And that’s just these 2 – let alone the cabinet they are working with and Cameron is happy with – with arch-homophobes like Baroness Warsi and Ian Duncan Smith and William Hague (the last two party leaders – which says so much about the bigoted Tories).
And now they post “It Gets Better Videos.”

That is obscene.

THEY are the reason it isn’t better now. They have done so much outright evil shit over the years – not just their party, them PERSONALLY – and now they make It Gets Better videos and try to campaign to us?! Now they use this – a project that tries to repair some of the damage they CHEERED FOR and supported – for propaganda, for rainbow-washing, to whitewash the past?

Cameron and May, you’re beyond out of line. The pair of you physically disgust me.