LGBT+ people ‘still facing abuse and discrimination’, says Cork clinic

People cannot be complacent about the threat that social media and far-right ideas pose to members of the [url=

https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-41861676.html]LGBT+[/url] community.

That is according to Cork’s Sexual Health Clinic which is appealing to people from the LGBT+ community to respond to a survey on their experiences of discrimination, safety concerns, and online hostility.

The survey is currently under way and the clinic particularly wants to hear from trans and ‘gender-diverse’ people.

The centre’s senior health promotion officer, Phil Corcoran, told The Echo: “We have to be careful not to be complacent.

“I think a lot of people assumed that when we got marriage equality that was everything fixed, but I suppose a lot of the architecture that supported discrimination against people is still very much there.

“There are certain kinds of attitudes in society that still exist. We are lucky that marriage equality was carried by quite a significant margin, but I know myself just from going door to door during that campaign that there were a lot of people who were vociferously opposed to people to having the same rights.

“That has not gone away. I think trans people in particular are very much victims of that at the moment.”

Drag queens assaulted

Last October, two drag queens were assaulted on Oliver Plunkett Street in Cork city when they were filming a video for social media to promote a drag event.

Mr Corcoran said the aim of the survey is to “get a broad picture of what it is like to live as an LGBT+ person in Ireland and to explore in more detail the information we might be hearing and the discrimination people might be facing.

“We just feel the time is right now to be doing this. There is a lot of negativity being fed through social media and the online world, and we can’t get complacent about this type of misinformation. People can get swept up in all sorts of movements online that may not have any basis in reality.”

He said the rise in vitriol against members of the LGBT+ community “has been fed by a lot of actors and we just want a sense of the scale of this and how it is affecting people’s participation in society, what kinds of hostility that people are facing, so that we can look at the shape of supports going forward and make sure that everyone feels they belong in Irish society”. 

The survey can be accessed at Crossroads: Understanding Rising Hate and the Changes Needed to Support LGBTQ+ Communities in Ireland.