The Trans Pride Brighton team is disappointed to hear about anti-trans protests at London Pride today and we’d like to express our support and solidarity to anybody who has been affected by this. It’s worth noting how differently the homophobic protests were handled compared to how the transphobic protest was allowed to happen.
Over the last few weeks TPB has been engaging with local trans and non-binary people, LGBT organisations, the council and the police about the threat of an anti-trans protest. We take this very seriously as the safety and well-being of our community is our number one concern.
As angry as we are, our policy is to not engage directly with anti-trans protesters, as we feel we would be playing into the hands of the anti-trans groups. Instead we encourage trans people and allies to make their feelings known to the organisers of London Pride and other organisations supposedly representing us that ignore our community, and in some cases enable the continued hatred against us on a daily basis.
We won’t share exactly what plans we have in place, in order to protect our community, but please know that everybody at TPB is working hard to keep every single one of our guests safe and secure.
We are particularly looking for cisgender allies to volunteer for events covering the whole week of Trans Pride 2018. If you’d like to help, please visit transpridebrighton.org/volunteer.