Martin Docherty-Hughes
Main Page: Martin Docherty-Hughes (Scottish National Party - West Dunbartonshire)
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP) [V]
I am grateful and thankful for being able to participate in this very important debate and to do so as an open member of the LGBTQ community.
The last time I spoke on issues relating to LGBTQ rights related to our relationship with the Sultanate of Brunei, a Commonwealth state that clearly criminalises the entirety of the LGBTQ community. As I said on the Floor of the House at that time, it is where people of our identity are
“stoned, hanged and murdered”
for
“having sex with someone of the same gender, along with lesbian women, who are…whipped.”—[Official Report, 4 April 2019; Vol. 657, c. 1278.]
We should be under no illusion that our relationship as a state with other Commonwealth nations must be robust and frank on the issue of LGBTQ rights.
Closer to home, I want to pay tribute to colleagues in Georgia who continue to be frustrated in their ability to have equality in the Georgian state, no matter that the constitution itself gives them the right to full equality. I pay tribute to the work that Georgia Pride did in June and continues to do.
It has to be clear that not all members of the LGBT community are pro-LGBTQ rights. For many of us, especially men, including white men who are vocal and who, for example, are in Parliament, because of certain economics or demographics, we need to be clear in challenging our own concepts of what it means to be LGBTQ in this state. We need to hear more voices from women, from young black people and from people from other minority ethnic communities. I say that as co-chair of the all-party group for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma. The LGBT community there are starting to become a vocal part of representing their culture and history.
I have a short time to speak. I often say that our diversity is our greatest strength. That strength, however, is being torn asunder at the moment by what I would call non-state actors targeting the most vulnerable, specifically our trans brothers and sisters. I stand in solidarity with them today.
As I come to my conclusion, I pay tribute to those in my own community who, over the years, through intolerance and fear, have not been able to get this far, who have taken their own lives, and whose lives have been ended early due to ill health—not receiving the appropriate support—and isolation. I pay tribute to the men and women of West Dunbartonshire who never made it. We need to recognise, as I have said, that diversity is our greatest strength and we should not allow non-state and state actors to undermine that very strength.