You don’t need to have raised children to know that, at its core, parenthood is about unconditional love. We don’t get to choose them, and we may find friends and companions that we gel with better, but family is supposed to be that ultimate safety net. If your life is upended and all else seems lost, it should be a reserve of love that will never be depleted. Of course, parenthood also means disapproval, disappointment, even blind fury – but, for most, being rejected or abandoned by those who brought you into the world is unthinkable.
For many LGBTQ+ people, however, it can be a grim fact of life. It has been more than half a century since same-sex acts were partly decriminalised, and 25 years since a Labour government was elected that commendably repealed anti-gay laws. But according to a new study by the charity Galop, a third of LGBTQ+ people have suffered abuse from relatives, mostly their parents. Among trans and non-binary people, that figure is even higher: more than four in 10.
Statistics rarely convey the horror of what they account for, so consider just this one example. One young trans woman I spoke to couldn’t remember how old she was when she was first hit by her father, but she clearly remembers, aged 16, him drunkenly “smashing [her] against the kitchen cabinet”, then holding her by her throat “about a foot off the ground”. The provocation? She had kissed her then-boyfriend at a party in her parents’ home. Years of abuse took her to the edge. Being around men who reminded her of her father – whether it was because they smelled of his aftershave, were also bald, or were customers who yelled at her at work – would lead to the trauma resurfacing. Her wider family didn’t stand by her; contact with them has evaporated. “It sucks not to have blood relations who are sound,” she said, “but it is what it is.”
It is common for young LGBTQ+ people to know, even in a vague sense, that they are different at an early age, and to panic at the possible implications. Adolescence is when the pressure to conform and “fit in” often feels most acute. For young queer folk, this can mean sleep-deprived nights full of cold sweats and panicked imaginings of how loved ones may react when they’re decloseted. These days, for most, what follows is affirmation: hugs, pledges to love them no matter what, that their happiness is all that matters.
But it wasn’t so for the young gay woman who recalls her bigoted grandmother moving in when she was 16, using a homophobic slur and triggering a huge row. Her mother told her daughter that she couldn’t live with them if she was going to antagonise her grandmother “by being gay”, and demanded she pack her things and leave. Although she found refuge with her supportive father, she told me, her mental health inevitably suffered.
Parents know what is best for their child, goes a well-worn cliche, but in too many cases this is demonstrably untrue. Pre-pandemic polling by Galop showed that one in five Britons still think being LGBTQ+ is immoral, and one in 10 thought LGBTQ+ people were a danger to others. That’s a minority, sure, but it’s still millions of people. Some parents may rationalise their failure to affirm in loving terms – believing that being lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans will lead to an unhappy life, without realising that such unhappiness is often caused by attitudes such as theirs. By depriving their offspring of unconditional love at a young age, they risk inflicting lifelong damage on their children, planting a bomb within them that may not detonate for years. According to Galop’s research, 92% of the LGBTQ+ people who had suffered negative experiences at a formative age had suffered lasting repercussions. “This isn’t a stranger in the street, this is your home, your safe place, the people closest to you who you trust the most,” says Galop’s Abigail Herbert, “so it feels as if there’s no one you can talk to when you’ve had that trust broken.”
All research shows that mental health struggles are disproportionately higher among LGBTQ+ people; this, in turn, leads to higher levels of alcohol and drug abuse, all too often a form of self-medication. Almost all LGBTQ+ people have friends who need special support because they were robbed of the love that should have been taken as read. So when a young gay man tells me of his violent father calling him a “gay bastard”, or when a non-binary person tells me about how their family cut them off, I see parents placing their right to baseless bigotry ahead of their child’s wellbeing.
As the great British anti-trans moral panic escalates ever further – framing the most marginalised minority of the LGBTQ+ rainbow as would-be sexual predators and threats to children – more of those ticking bombs are being set among a new generation. When encountering those for whom a fear of trans rights has become a life-consuming passion, it is difficult not to worry about what their reaction to their children might be if one of them revealed a trans identity.
One trans woman told me of being beaten by their mother when they came out aged six; of since being misgendered and assaulted by their father; of having brothers pull out hair extensions and punching their chest; of being trapped for so long on endless NHS waiting lists for trans services that a family member told them to “stop this transgender madness”.
It doesn’t even have to be abuse – with so few willing to push back on anti-trans talking points in the British media, many parents may simply be left baffled and lacking the emotional tools to support their children. As Galop underlines, with trans women too often unwelcome in women’s refuges, and a lack of specialist LGBTQ+ provision, many trans people are forced into potentially dangerous emergency accommodation, into homelessness, or to remain with their abusive relatives.
For years, rescinded anti-gay laws and drastically improved public attitudes led to growing confidence among LGBTQ+ people. This may prove to have been complacent: homophobic and transphobic hate crimes are surging, and the ricocheting effect of anti-trans rhetoric creates an increasingly toxic environment for LGBTQ+ people in general. Stonewall, the main LGBTQ+ civil rights organisation, is under siege, and the Council of Europe has placed Britain in the same category for backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights as Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey.
Such an atmosphere will embolden, rather than educate, those afflicted with anti-LGBTQ+ bigotries; some will have children who may internalise their parent’s sense of rejection. This should be considered a form of child abuse. No one should doubt the challenges of parenthood, that mistakes are made, that perfection is unattainable. But offering unconditional love costs nothing; depriving a child of it can cost everything.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
