‘It’s not good enough to just give us a nightclub and say it’s inclusive’: The rise of LGBTQ+ sober spaces
booze was abundant and free-flowing, the 30-year-old thought that it would be best for her wellbeing that she overhauled her attitude to drinking – by quitting all together.‘In short, I just wasn’t happy with some of the habits I was starting to pick up,’ Lorraine explains. ‘I was never medically diagnosed as an alcoholic, but it was certainly getting to a point where it was a concern for me.‘It wasn’t really related to the fact I’m trans, but it was after I’d come out and it had contributed to a lot of my stress at the time.
When I recognised my drinking had become a problem, I just thought, “okay, I’m done”.’Lorraine isn’t an outlier in this trend of banishing the booze, with an increasing number of people looking to cut back on or stop drinking alcohol entirely.
The Office of National Statistics has reported around 1/5 of adults in the UK are now teetotal, with the number of people who consume alcohol regularly declining steadily from 2004.
The popularisation of sober challenges, such as Dry January and Going Sober For October, have also encouraged people flirting with teetotalism to give it a go long term.In relation to her own journey to sobriety, Lorraine acknowledges that her binge drinking habits for Dutch courage became a supplement for genuine confidence, and so she thought going entirely cold turkey was the only way she could move forward.‘I started my gender transition in my mid-20s,’ she says. ‘That’s fairly late.
