Annie Wallace: Pride is a protest – the message of tolerance is working extra hard right now
London on the 1st July 1972. This year’s Pride in London parade is on Saturday 2nd July.This wasn’t an instant national movement, however, as Scotland had to wait until 1995 for its first pride march, in Edinburgh.
However, these days, the number of Pride events nationally increases annually, as smaller communities and towns decide to stage their own events, spreading a huge rainbow across the entire country, getting bigger every year!If you’re a social media user, you’ll likely have seen an uptick in the annual ‘When is straight pride month??’ nonsense too.
That and, ‘You don’t need Pride anymore; you’ve got more rights than me!’ – both statements which only go to prove how necessary Pride Month and other associated dates and festivals throughout the year are.Back in 2015, Gay Times invited me to write an article about my joining Hollyoaks as the first trans person to play a regular trans character in a UK soap opera, and I wrote, ostensibly, a very positive, forward-looking piece, about the increasing visibility of trans people in daily life, and, yes, TV dramas too.I couldn’t have predicted, seven years later, that a bitter biteback from far-right wing agitators, so-called gender-critical groups, and noisy bigots would result in trans people currently facing daily attacks from Government, the mainstream press and social media.
The trans community are currently fighting just to KEEP the hard-won rights we fought for in the 90s. It’s an ongoing, and exhausting task, but a necessary one.There’s a great phrase – ‘Pride is a Protest’ – from the riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn 53 years ago, through marches against the dreadful ‘Section 28’ which blighted the lives of young people between 1988 and 2003.
