The unspoken effects of the US abortion rights ban on the LGBTQ+ community

effectively banning trans women competing in the sport, to Roe v Wade being overturned and abortion rights in the US being taken away, to a deadly shooting in one of the oldest LGBTQ+ clubs in Oslo in Norway. That particular shooting – which happened in supposedly one of the safest countries for LGBTQ+ people in the world – should be a chilling wake up call for us all. Never has it seemed more important to stick together and find solidarity with our joint struggles. While these events might seem disconnected, we have to be able to look at the bigger picture of what’s been happening in the past few years. All around the world, human rights have been constricted or taken away entirely – and the movement partly behind it is a well-established one that’s known as the anti-gender movement.We’ve seen this with trans rights being stripped away in Hungary, to ‘LGBT-free zones’ and a near-total ban on abortions in Poland, to an increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in the UK  In the UK, we have seen an increase in so-called gender critical views, which have dominated discussions around trans rights for the past few years.According to ILGA-Europe, anti-trans rhetoric warns that ‘self-determination for trans people will lead to harming minors’.