Exclusive: Former Scottish Labour leader says she feels more scared as a lesbian today and calls for a kinder debate on transgender issues
Kezia Dugdale, the former leader of Scottish Labour, says she is now “quite scared” as a lesbian in Britain and has started to feel nervous holding her wife’s hand in public.
Speaking to the Guardian in Edinburgh on the announcement of her appointment as the chair of Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity, she said it was “completely possible” gay rights in the UK could be eroded with the rise of rightwing populism.
Equal marriage could not be taken for granted, she cautioned. “I don’t think it is an implausible argument now in the way that it maybe was five years ago. My rationale for that is: look at Italy, for example, where you see a rollback of rights for LGBT people. It’s happened pretty quickly, it’s centred around concepts of family life and the country is going backwards. It’s not beyond the realm that that could happen here.”
Dugdale, who led Scottish Labour from 2015-17, will take up the unpaid position in six months. She takes charge after a turbulent period in which Stonewall lost more than half of its income and had to make dozens of staff redundant, in large part because of its uncompromising position on transgender rights.
