The UK has recently lost high positions in the rankings of LGBTQ-friendly countries in Rainbow Map, with activists condemning the drop as “not coincidental”, but the change is being seen across Europe, Big Issue reports.
Until 2015, ILGA-Europe – one of the continent’s largest LGBTQ+ rights groups based in Brussels – consistently ranked the UK as the most LGBT-friendly European state. However, the failure to ban conversion therapy and toxic controversy over transgender rights has seen the UK plummet in the rankings.
According to the organisation’s annual Rainbow Map, the UK now ranks 16th – below Spain, Greece, Belgium and Ireland. This is one place higher than last year’s 17th place, but lower than the 14th place in 2022.
The Rainbow Map ranking rates 49 European countries on their LGBTQ+ legal and policy practices from 0 to 100 per cent.
ILGA-Europe cited “efforts to rewrite guidelines to limit access to trans-specific healthcare” and a failure to ban conversion therapy as reasons for the drop, which has seen the UK tumble from scoring 86% in 2015 to scoring just 52% this year.
Cleo Madeleine, from trans-led grassroots organisation Gendered Intelligence, told the Big Issue that the decline was “unsurprising”. She said:
The reasons for the substantial fall over the past decade are really apparent to anyone in the sector and the queer community as a whole. It’s not an accidental lack of care, but a sustained opposition to rights and protections for queer people.
The UK’s precipitous decline can be attributed to several factors. It’s a “death of a thousand cuts”, Cleo Madeleine says.
In 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May launched an LGBTQ+ “action plan” in which she vowed to ban so-called conversion therapy. This therapy was the baseless practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, often through religion and prayer. The UN said the practice “could amount to torture” and campaigners called it “cruel and unusual”.
Boris Johnson reiterated the pledge to ban the abhorrent practise before the 2019 general election. But with the next general election imminent, any attempt to ban conversion therapy has been “kicked into the long grass”. Madeleine also added:
It’s been postponed, it’s been walked back, it’s not a priority for the government.
Transgender rights have also become one of the fronts of the ongoing culture war.
In 2017, Theresa May announced plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, making it an administrative rather than a medical process, in line with World Health Organisation recommendations. The Gender Recognition Act allows transgender people to apply for and receive a Gender Recognition Certificate, which in turn allows them to update the gender on their birth certificate.
But the Conservative Party’s position has changed markedly since then: last year, Sunak told Conservative delegates in Manchester:
We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t – a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
Amnesty International UK’s gender justice director Chiara Capraro wrote for the Big Issue:
Large sections of the media and political world have invested in manufacturing moral panic about trans people.
This has shifted the Overton window away from trans people self-identifying as their true gender. Indeed, the Equality and Human Rights Commission – UK’s independent human rights watchdog – recently argued for specifying that “sex” in the UK’s Equality Act in fact refers to ‘biological sex’, thus weakening protections for trans people.
Madeleine says that the government has attempted to “draw attention away from economic failure” by “punching down”. But it has a real impact on the community. She also added:
[People] feels like no one has their corner in the face of this mistreatment. People are disaffected, they’re depressed, they feel like there’s no future for them. Young people are particularly impacted. They’re 16, 17, 18 – and they feel like they don’t have any hope. Because this toxic rhetoric is all they’re hearing from the most powerful people in the country.
Nonetheless, trans and other queer people “aren’t going anywhere”, she said.
Jayne Ozanne of the Ozanne Foundation, an LGBTQ+ rights campaigner and survivor of conversion therapy, warned that historians will look back on the last six years with “utter disbelief” at how the UK changed from being “a global leader on LGBTQ+ rights to being a global leader in undermining the rights of that very same group”. She said:
Continued procrastination in providing the primary protection that the LGBTQ+ community requires, that of banning harmful conversion practices, has allowed abusers to continue to act with impunity. A barrage of attacks on trans people, led by the very minister tasked with protecting them, has all but obliterated their ability to go about their day to day lives with any sense of safety. It is true that pendulums always swing – but the speed of this change has confounded many across the world. The good news is that pendulums always swing back – let’s hope that it does so just as quickly, and soon.
Equalities minister Justine Greening, has insisted that churches must be made to: ‘Keep up with modern attitudes‘.
The whole of the UK is suffering from new “sex education”, she said. TV programmes, aimed at children as young as three, promote ‘gender fluidity’, as an enabler of thoughtfulness and individuality.
At the same time, Ministers have denied worried parents the right to withdraw their children from primary school classes. Meanwhile, “outside educators” teach children about sex positions, ‘satisfying’ pornography consumption and how to masturbate.
How things stand in the EU
In other European countries, the picture is more favourable. For the ninth year in a row, the Rainbow Map recognises Malta as the most LGBTQ-friendly country, scoring 88%.
Second place went to Iceland with 83 per cent, up three places thanks to new legislation banning conversion practices.
In Estonia and Greece, legislatures changed the rules allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. Liechtenstein also expanded adoption rights for same-sex couples.
The three countries at the other end of the Rainbow Map scale are Russia (2%), Azerbaijan (2%) and Turkey (5%). Russia lost seven points and dropped three places due to federal legislation banning legal recognition of gender and transgender health care.
Poland remains at the bottom of the EU ranking with 18%, followed by Romania (19%) and Bulgaria (23%).
The small town of Svidnik in eastern Poland will recently receive the status of “LGBT-free town”. Svidnik is the ideological stronghold of the Law and Justice party in power. The decision by the city authorities in Swidnik has angered MEPs in Strasbourg. They have demanded that the European Commission take urgent action against “homophobes”.
In Hungary, where right-wing populists represent the political mainstream, an “anti-gay” trend has also emerged in recent months. For example, Fidesz MPs called for a boycott of the US firm Coca-Cola after it placed advertising posters with gay couples. Hungarian parliament speaker László Kövér said gay adoption of children amounted to “paedophilia in a moral sense”. Hungary has refused to participate in Eurovision 20 in Amsterdam because it considers the contest “too gay”.
