Something has been bothering me for a while, and the recent conversation around Tip Toe, and the wider political landscape it reflects, has brought it into much sharper focus… There seems to be a growing assumption, particularly in certain corners of social media, that being LGBTQ+ comes with a pre-assigned set of political beliefs. That our identity places us, automatically and without question, in one particular box. And, honestly, I think that’s worth pushing back on.
Just to be clear about where I’m coming from, and my position – I’m a liberal. I stood in the 2024 General Election for the Liberal Democrats, and I’ll be standing in the 2027 Council elections. Before that, I served as an elected Alliance Party representative in Northern Ireland. My political identity is not something I’m coy about, even if I don’t shout it from the roof tops like others, and it is, I’d argue, a perfectly natural home for an LGBTQ+ person, not least because the Liberal Democrats have a long and consistent track record of fighting for LGBTQ+ rights, while also holding space for a range of views and respecting the ability of people to hold them.
BUT! My political identity and my LGBTQ+ identity are not the same thing, and I’d challenge anyone who tried to tell me they should be. They definitely have overlap and cohesion, but not to every issue.
What unites us as a community is not ideology. It’s experience. It’s the prejudice we’ve faced, the rights we’ve had to fight for, the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves in a world that hasn’t always welcomed us – that’s the common thread, and it’s a powerful one, as the response to Tip Toe has shown. When Russell T Davies holds a mirror up to the threats facing our community, we recognise ourselves in it collectively.
But recognising shared experience is different from assuming shared politics, and I think we’re on a genuinely dangerous path if we start treating political pluralism within our community as a kind of betrayal. The global population will never speak with one voice, and it would be foolhardy to think otherwise. But, what we can do is work together in common interest, find the ground we share, and engage honestly with the things we disagree on, including with each other.
I’m a pragmatic person, and I like to think the best of people, trying to listen even when I disagree, and I think robust, respectful debate is healthy. What I don’t think is healthy is the assumption that because someone is LGBTQ+, they must hold a particular economic position, or support a particular party, or view the world through a specific ideological lens. We are not a homogenous group. We are individuals with different backgrounds, different experiences, different priorities, brought together by something real and significant, but not by a requirement to think identically.
The one caveat I’d always hold to is this: pluralism has limits. Viewpoints that would endanger our community, reduce our rights, or treat us as less than equal don’t fall under the banner of reasonable difference of opinion. That is very important, and it shouldn’t be blurred. But within that, there is enormous space for disagreement, for nuance, for people to hold genuinely different views about economics, governance, and the role of the state, without that making them a bad LGBTQ+ person or a traitor to some imagined collective.
We fought for the right to be seen as individuals. It would be a strange thing to then demand that we all think as one.