Celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month

This month, our community has been coming together to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month. This is a perfect opportunity for our staff and students to help to increase the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, and to reflect on what progress has been made in terms of LGBTQ+ rights and visibility since 2003 when Section 28, the law that banned “promotion of homosexuality” in the UK, was repealed. This month is about learning from the past, applying lessons learned and recognising how far we still have to go, and standing in solidarity with LGBTQ+ people as we look towards a future where we are all included and are free to be proud to be ourselves.

As Inclusion Champions, since our blog in Pride Month last year, we have continued to engage with and to try to learn from and better understand and support our LGBTQ+ community so as to be able to provide clear and visible leadership in relation to LGBTQ+ equity. We have been working closely with our staff and student networks and representatives: participating as members of the working group established to support trans and non-binary students and staff on our campuses, benefiting from reverse mentoring, undertaking allyship training, and participating in an Inclusive Leadership Programme alongside other members of the University Steering Group. We recognise that one particular current area of focus for us as a university is to seek to do more in relation to bi equity, learning how to be bi allies, and demonstrating to all staff and students that bi equity is a key part of our commitment to inclusion.

To mark LGBTQ+ History Month, the Ivor Creve Lecture Hall is being lit up in the evenings in the colours of the LGBTQ+ flag stripes, and our new Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag is flying proudly above the Albert Sloman Library. Whilst the classic Pride flag is a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, over the last few years it has been updated to better include and represent more communities. We have found the brief description of the history of the Progress Pride flag, and how it has evolved to better represent and reflect more communities, useful in aiding our understanding, so we thought we would share it in case it might be useful to others.

This blog also gives us the opportunity to highlight a number of our existing community groups and forums, all of which are active and open to new members:

• our Students’ Union LGBTQ+ Society and support for LGBTQ+ students
• our LGBTQ+ Staff Forum
• our LGBTQ+ Allies staff group

Also worth noting is that, since Autumn 2021, the University’s Working Group to Support Trans and Non-binary Students and Staff, which we have both been members of, has functioned as a space for our trans and non-binary community to come together and to be part of a collaborative force for change. The Working Group has been instrumental in helping us to better understand the experiences of trans and non-binary members of our community, and in putting in place initiatives to improve these experiences including: sourcing funding to support trans and non-binary students by launching the Gender Affirmation Fund in June 2022, offering transgender, non-binary, and gender-non-conforming students funding for gender affirming items; publicising the location of gender-neutral toilets; organising regular training sessions; launching the new Communities Common Room; and exploring the feasibility of introducing a scholarship for trans students. Having achieved its original objectives, the group is now continuing as a new staff and student forum.

We hope that staff and students will have seen and have already had the opportunity to participate in some of the LGBTQ+ History Month events taking place throughout the month on campus, online, and in the local area. And our Students’ Union LGBTQ+ Network are also running a wide range of events for the student community throughout the month.

Please do join us in supporting these events that look back on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history, whilst also raising awareness of the issues faced by LGBTQ+ people today and the need for us all to do more to stop homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.

Monica Illsley, LGBTQ+ Inclusion Champion

Professor Chris Greer, Inclusion Champion for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people

Riley Iles, LGBQ+ Officer 2022-23, LGBTQ+ Society President 2022-23