LGB Alliance ≠ the Community: Who Gets Left Behind When Safety Becomes Selective?

When Georgia asked me to write this piece for Wanted It Group, I spent a lot of time thinking about hypervisibility. About what happens when your body, your identity, your needs are constantly watched, judged, legislated. When your visibility is conditional. When your survival comes with a cost.

What does it mean when your survival is too messy to be marketable? When you’re told your safety matters, but only if it fits someone else’s definition of who you are. When you’re watched constantly, yet never really seen.

This is the context I carried with me when the UK Supreme Court ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. A ruling that now makes it legal to exclude trans women (even those with Gender Recognition Certificates) from single-sex spaces like women’s refuges and hospital wards.

It is not a coincidence that the LGB Alliance was consulted during this case.

It is not a coincidence that no testimony from trans people was accepted.

This is not neutrality.

This is a message.

And the message is this: your body can be debated, but not protected. 

As a cis bisexual woman, I want to be completely transparent about my position. I don’t know what it’s like to move through the world as a trans person. I haven’t had to fight for legal recognition of my gender. But I do know what it’s like to be told your existence is inconvenient. And I know what it’s like to have institutions speak over you - while claiming to protect you.

The LGB Alliance does not speak for me. They do not speak for the queer community I know - resilient, messy, political, expansive. They speak for a narrow vision of queerness: one that is digestible to institutions, palatable to the press, and useful to gain power or political allyship.

They claim to protect us - but their version of ‘protection’ always demands someone else’s exclusion.

When your ‘safeguarding’ is built on exclusion? That’s not safety. That’s control.

Here at Wanted It Group, we talk about survival. Not the easy, clean kind - but the kind that gets you through nights that institutions exclude, downplay and ignore. The kind that says, ‘I don’t owe you my palatability to deserve protection’. 

Hypersexuality is one expression of that survival. So is rage. So is withdrawal. So is demanding to be let in to spaces that were never built with you in mind.

And when we talk about visibility, we need to remember that being visible doesn’t always mean being safe. Sometimes it just means being easier to target.

That’s why it’s so dangerous when organisations like the LGB Alliance claim to speak for all of us. Because they are not protecting the community, they are protecting a very, very narrow slice of it. And they’re doing so at the expense of people whose lives are already under threat.

To any trans person reading this - especially if you are a survivor - please hear this:

You shouldn’t have to fight this hard to be believed.

You shouldn’t have to defend your need for care.

You shouldn’t have to listen to the people with the biggest platforms in the room tell you that your presence is the risk.

You are not a threat. You are not a liability. You are not an afterthought.

You are the community.

And I am standing beside you, in rage and in love, refusing to let that truth be erase ✊🏼🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Holly

Friend of Georgia. Cis bisexual woman. Survivor.

And someone who is not okay with this.