I am writing a book about being LGBTQ+ right now
Loud and Queer will be published early 2025 by Bluebird
The title for this one update feels fairly self-explanatory. Yet, there is so much I want to say. It’s not every day you achieve everything you ever wanted to by the age of twenty four and yet here I am. I guess, by the time the book is published I will be twenty six, which still feels young. Perhaps I need bigger ambitions.
The only thing I have ever wanted to do my entire life was to be an author. Other things, too - an archaeologist, an ornithologist, at one point even a forensic anthropologist - but I have always come back to the same fundamental need: to write.
I am indeed writing my debut non-fiction title, Loud and Queer, which will be published by Bluebird in early 2025. If you want to read the snazzy announcement in The Bookseller, you can do so here.
I have been approached by agents and editors alike over the past five years or so. Given my ambitions to be an author, it might seem odd to turn people and opportunities down. I have always known, from the time I was a teenager, that my first book would explore what it means to be an LGBTQ+ person and the ongoing difficulties we face. Although most of my online audience now knows me for being autistic & advocating around neurodiversity and disability, it was my experience of homophobia that coloured so much of my growing up. It was fighting for equality in LGBTQ+ rights that first brought me into the world of campaigning, or advocacy, or whatever you want to call it.
Loud and Queer is not a book that I expect to win over the people who are trying to exterminate LGBTQ+ people from existence - and yes, that is a current reality. You need only look at the 492 anti-trans bills introduced in the US in the first three months of 2023, the criminalisation of identifying as LGBTQ+ in Uganda and the recommendation by the EHRC - an organisation that is supposedly designed to protect human rights - to change the Equality Act to exclude trans people - to realise that we are in an incredibly dangerous time for LGBTQ+ people. The word genocide is being used to describe what is happening particularly with regards to trans people, not just by the community itself, but by people with expertise in genocide and its prevention.
And yet, when I talk to people (both inside and outside the community) about the realities of being an LGBTQ+ person today, many are ignorant of how bad things are, or what they can do to help. Or indeed, even that their help is necessary. We need not only intra-community solidarity, but our so-called allies to show-up meaningfully.
I have come to understand that, alongside those that vehemently oppose the existence of, let alone equality for, LGBTQ+ people, there are those people who have questions or concerns about being LGBTQ+ and want to have a dialogue, but do not know how. I have met many people who are scared that they will offend or being decried as a bigot for not having the language or for believing what mainstream media, or their religion, or their politicians, have taught them about what it means to be LGBTQ+.
I have found that one of my skills is to have a conversation and offer some different perspectives, some evidence, some resources and to sometimes take the emotion out of the conversation. I have met people furious that I am allowed near their children and had a very calm, grown up chat with them where they realise I am not the terrible monster they were lead to believe I was. Perhaps it’s my disarming charm, perhaps it’s the simple truth that it is more difficult to hate people you know.
I do not expect every queer or trans person to do this work, let me be very clear. We spend so much of the time educating the world simply going about our day to day. But especially as a cis white middle-class lesbian, I have found I’ve been able to leverage the privileges I have to have dialogues with people who then go on to do less harm as a result of us having that conversation. I don’t do this because it is my voice that is most important, but because it is often safer for me to enter into that dialogue than it would be for some of my LGBTQ+ siblings.
Right now, what was once my free time is being taken up hearing the stories of LGBTQ+ people across the globe - those driving change, surviving unimaginable challenges and those just living their lives.
It would be easy to mistake Loud and Queer for a book about how hard it is to be LGBTQ+ right now. In reality, it is about hope. It’s about how resilient and resourceful we are, the fact that no attempt to restrict our freedoms has ever truly quashed us. We have always been here and we will always be. That’s the thing that scares the people who hate us so much; they can’t win.