Recent Attacks on The Transgender Community is a Reminder of Why Keeping Equality is Just as Important as The Battle For it

Now whether you’ve been keeping up to date with the news on TV or getting little snippets of it on social media you will no doubt have seen bulletins about the current President of the United States of America attacking the Transgender Community. One of them being reports of actions to remove all Transgender colleagues from the American Military. When I first read about it I was just disgusted at this, I mean at the end of the day no-one decides to suddenly identify as being an individual trapped in the wrong body, no-one decides that they’ll be attracted romantically or sexually to someone from the same sex, no-one decides to suddenly identify as different ethnicity, no-one decides to become disabled and use a wheelchair to get from A-Z or have a learning disability vice versa

For me, I do have experience of prejudice based on a characteristic of which I have zero control over whatsoever. As mentioned in previous columns I am Autistic, but not just that, I also happen to be gay. Now I’m not going to draw so much about the rubbish I had at school that was possibly related to it, mainly because I was in my early to mid teens and very little was known about Disability apart from having to use a wheelchair or having Down Syndrome. Though that last one isn’t a Disability it still got viewed the same. For me, my ‘life experiences’ as it were that I can draw upon happened when I began in the jobs world when I began proper employment

Starting from when I was 17 there was only three jobs where I faced discrimination, both by the public and staff. My first one was when I worked as a Kitchen Assistant, or as a Pot Washer, if I was to be a bit more upfront about it. Professionally, it was the first actual job but unfortunately it only lasted a few months, and it was the first time where I experienced my first ever Dismissal. 

Quite often I do reflect on it and what I have come to suspect is that the Management obviously must’ve suspected that my behavioural mannerisms weren’t the same as everyone else’s and that I was a bit odd. Anyway cut a long story short they obviously decided that they didn’t want me and made up some excuse to use against me and got shut of me. 

And as with a lot of other people I’ve faced discrimination in the workplace due to both my Autism and sexuality, the latter of which I’m still facing 

Now the Equality Act came into force in 2010, its basic goal; to provide legal rights and protections to those who were being discriminated against because of a characteristic they had absolutely no control over.

In one of my past employments I worked for a branch of a well-known British retailer (clue, they’ve been around since 1919 and by 2011 they were the 3rd largest retailer in the world). I first began there in 2005 and left in 2017. Every so often they would change Management, there’d be a variety of reasons for it. 

For me, though, the Management that came in prior to my leaving weren’t a nice bunch and I was obviously amongst the number of people they didn’t much care for and wanted gone. It was sort of ‘I cannot stand him/her, he/she has got to go’, eventually the working environment got to such a toxic level because of the bullying culture that I just quit. To this day I firmly believe that it was due to my Autism.

Now that’s just two examples I’ve mentioned when it comes to Discrimination and even though the Equality Act was something of a landmark achievement the reasons for it being there are still around. Going back to the Marriage Equality Act, and others that fall into the same veins,you could easily think that just because we’ve achieved it in written law that we can all relax and that there’d be no reason to continue the battle. This is where I firmly believe that the battle is always in two halves; the battle to achieve and the battle to maintain. 

Though Equity has been achieved there will always be those who firmly believe that minority groups don’t deserve those rights, either because they believe it’s against nature (or some ridiculous reason), they perceive it as a threat to their own (would love to know how they arrived at that conclusion), others from within those minority groups who believe that they’re not worthy of it (through being taught they’re a burden who’ve brought it on themselves no doubt)

If history has taught us anything it’s that Equality can be won just as easily as it’s attacked 

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