Dr Daniel Vujcich is the CEO of thread: community + health (formerly WAAC).
I attended a meeting of community services CEOs to discuss how the sector should respond to the rise of ideologies that threaten social cohesion. Attitudes in the room ranged from idealistic enthusiasm to “sticking to our lanes” and not getting “political”.
The latter vexed me.
As if what we do every day isn’t political. As if the things that threaten our sector don’t swerve or don’t drive in different cars in many different lanes.
But the idealism vexed me too. Systems don’t transform by writing things down on big bits of paper, which we leave behind at the end of a session in the hope they will be brought to life by some incantation that the session organisers whisper when everyone has left the room. Systems change when we think about our own place in those systems and how we can disrupt them through action.
“Belonging” as a commodity
There’s a theory of why extremist ideologies actually win people over. It’s called the “3N Model”: need, narrative, network.
Need: Someone’s lost something real – a job, a house, a sense that the future was going to look a certain way.
Narrative: Someone gives them a story that explains the loss and names who’s responsible.
Network: Someone gives them a group to belong to while they act on it.
That’s it. That’s the whole machine. It’s not really about hate. Hate’s just the packaging. At the end of the day what is actually being sold is belonging.
The obvious answer is to offer a better version of that. Meet the same need, tell a truer story, build a better group to belong to. Except here’s the problem – we don’t actually have that to offer yet. Not really.
There are lanes in our own sector that we have gotten comfortable occupying. We need to ask who have we been overtaking or leaving in the emergency lane. That’s the work that WE need to do to build that better offer.
If we’re not asking ourselves these questions, then whatever we build to fight ideologies of hate and exclusion is just going to reproduce the same shape on the inside of our LGBTIQA+ community.
We say “the LGBTIQA+ community” like it’s one thing. We know it isn’t.
We might all be part of this community, but some of us live on land that belongs to others.
We might all be part of this community but some of us got on the census and some of us didn’t.
We might all be part of this community, but some of us have savings and some of us worry every fortnight whether the card will decline.
Some of us pass as straight, or as men in a patriarchy, and never have to think about it, while others have to think about everything about themselves. What they wear. The tone in which they speak. Where they walk at night. How close they park their car to a venue.
Some of us are ageing and worried about being old, and being gay and old in a system not designed for us.
Some of us have a much harder time getting a seat at the table because we live regionally, or weren’t sure if there’d be a ramp, or because we know we will overthink the things we say when we leave.
That’s what intersectionality actually is: a description of the fact that most of us are being squeezed by something and, at the exact same time, sitting comfortably on top of someone else. This means the interesting question isn’t just “how do we protect our community from hateful ideologies?” Of course, we have to do that and we already do it in a thousand ways.
We do it when we patiently reply to vitriolic posts to a news story about the Government’s decision that supports our community to have a base in the Rainbow Hub.
We do it when we advocate for reforms to ensure that we have long overdue and basic protections, and advocate against reforms that threaten to take hard fought rights away from us.
We do it when we brave the streets as our authentic selves every November despite being worried about our safety because we know we can never be safe if they drive us into hiding.
But we’re complicit in the problem unless we also ask which parts of our own community, and the communities outside of ours, we’re currently treating the way our enemies treat us as a collective. Who are WE excluding, or problematising, or denying space for?
The real work in the right order
Here’s where I think the real work is. The real work is in making sure we don’t bear any resemblance to the thing we so confidently oppose.
The reason I struggle with big paper problem-solving exercises at sector events is that it is never a coincidence who’s holding the pen when that page gets written.
It’s whoever’s already a leader in our sector. It’s whoever can take time to be there or has the comfort of not having to work weekends or look after their kids. It’s whoever doesn’t need an interpreter or a support worker just to be in the room. It’s usually whoever lives locally. It’s whoever isn’t exhausted and burnt out and already traumatised.
And that person’s version of “what we all agree on” tends to look a lot like their own life and priorities, with everyone else’s name signed underneath it. It means some of us are occasionally the ones saying a harder fight isn’t our core business.
But what if the problem is actually that we keep doing things in the wrong order?
If we believe none of us are free until all of us are free, then the fights we take on first shouldn’t be the ones that are easiest to win. The ones we know we will probably win. Instead, we should start by fighting for those who we already know will be freed last, if we leave it to the system.
Intersex law reform is the hard one; unnecessary medical intervention on infants who can’t consent, a much smaller and less visible community, and no easy sympathetic frame. Precisely because of that, it keeps getting pushed to a “next year” that never comes.
Addressing the waitlist for puberty blockers for trans young people is another one; it’s the fight that always gets called too complicated to touch this year.
If we’re serious about not doing what the far right does, ignoring whoever’s smallest and least convenient, these are the test cases for our vision. It means asking the LGBTIQA+ people with intersectional identities who come through our doors whether the “LGBTIQA+ issue” is actually separable, for them, from racial justice, or First Nations justice, or whatever else makes up the rest of their life.
This isn’t us drifting from our lane. It’s recognising that our people don’t live inside lines. They live full lives outside and between them, and we kid ourselves if we think we can keep someone safe by only ever tackling the one slice of what makes them feel unsafe.
There’s a difference between noticing a group is squeezed by the same system as you, and actually building a shared agenda with them, where they have a voice in what is being asked for. The first is just observation. The second costs something.
Building a better version of belonging
The film Pride, screened last month at an event hosted by PFLAG+ and supported by WAAC, tells the story of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners as an example of this. In 1984, the UK Government announced the closure of 20 coal pits in Yorkshire. There were villages whose economy was entirely centred on the coal industry. If you closed a pit, you killed a community.
The National Union of Mineworkers declared a strike. Over its eleven months, over 11,000 people were arrested at pickets. Thatcher blocked them from claiming the safety-net support that would normally cover a family with no income, and deducted a fixed sum from whatever benefits their families could still claim. The tactic was intended to starve them back onto the job.
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners responded by raising the equivalent of over 70,000 pounds for one of those mining communities. They didn’t stick to their lane. They saw a community in need and they ran toward them because they figured if one in five people are gay then one in five miners probably are too, and not being starved was probably their priority at that moment in time.
They offered a vision for what community looked like.
A year later, despite being defeated by Thatcher and starved back to work, the National Union of Mineworkers and mining communities from South Wales showed up with their banners and led the London Pride March in solidarity.
So here’s the actual challenge.
Pick the hardest, least convenient fight, the one with no easy sympathetic frame, or the least straightforward answer, and move it up the list this year, even if it costs you money or political capital or time you could spend elsewhere. We’re not always the only ones being crushed. Sometimes we’re the ones holding the pen a little too tightly.
Instead of “defeating the far right”, let’s commit to building the vision for belonging and inclusion we say we want, at a scale we actually control, starting now, and let it be visible enough that it argues for itself.
Dr Daniel Vujcich
