6 July 2016

The Huffington Post: Why Legal Equality For LGBT People Isn't Enough

It’s hard to believe that all of these legal changes happened since the turn of the millennium. It’s perfectly acceptable for us to step back and take a moment to acknowledge the distance we’ve travelled, but to become complacent, as many already have, is a huge mistake.

In 2015, Stonewall (the UK’s biggest LGBT equality charity) published their Unhealthy Attitudes report. Based on research carried out by YouGov, it found that one in ten staff directly involved in patient care in the health and social care sector had ‘witnessed colleagues express the belief that someone can be ‘cured’ of being lesbian, gay or bisexual’. The same report found that 25 percent of all staff questioned had never received any training on equality and diversity. It’s important for patients to feel comfortable when talking to care providers and sometimes that means having to be open about our sexual orientation and gender identity. [...]

In research carried out by YouGov for Stonewall in 2014, 56 percent of primary school teachers said that they hadn’t addressed different families in ways that include same-sex parents in the classroom. 36 percent of secondary school teachers had heard homophobic language, or negative remarks about lesbian, gay and bi people, from other staff members.

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