Tag Archives: biphobia

New words, old prejudices

By Clio Toogood | Wed 27th May 2020 - 2:00 pm

A friend shared a tweet with me from pink news yesterday; it highlighted Layla Moran’s coming out story for Pansexual and Panromantic Awareness and Visibility day. The comments on this tweet were a veritable smorgasbord of unkindness and prejudice. There are various themes of hate, the party, the day, Layla herself, trans people. The one that I want to focus on though is the comments that object to the word pansexual. I think these are the comments that are quite likely to seem harmless or even valid to a wider audience. They are not.

“Virtue signalling nonsense” “Pansexual? What community what? People go deeper every day; we need to start talking straight again. This is crazy” “So a new name for bisexual then?” “For those unsure, a Pansexual is someone who will will have sex with anyone with a pulse. In the old days, we called them Squaddies”. These are a few of such comments, I could go on, but frankly, it’s exhausting and demoralising.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged transphobia and TW homophobia | 10 Comments

On IDAHoBiT, what is in the Lib Dem manifesto for LGBT+ people?

By Jennie Rigg | Wed 17th May 2017 - 8:40 pm

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Today is IDAHoBiT – the international day against homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. Liberal Democrats have a proud tradition of fighting for LGBT+ rights. The 2017 manifesto, published today, aims to go further than any other party is furthering LGBT+ rights. However, because we Lib Dems believe that LGBT+ rights are human rights, a lot of the LGBT+ content in the manifesto is spread out in the various policy topic areas the manifesto covers. While I like this, because it means that LGBT+ rights are integral to our policies, not tacked on as an afterthought, it can make things easy to miss. In lieu of a manifesto index, therefore, I am going to draw it all together in one place, starting at the beginning:

Our young people are bright, creative and want a world that is clean and green and that the rest of us haven’t wrecked. They want jobs, good health and the chance to choose who they love and how they live– Introduction by Tim Farron, p7, emphasis mine.