The London Pride aftermath: the non-apology apologies
Jul 12th, 2008 by Rebecca
I’m a bit late to this one too, but it warrants some angry words. Unsurprisingly, both the London Pride organisers and the Metropolitan Police have issued public apologies for the incident at last week’s event where trans women were denied access to the women’s bathroom and threatened with arrest. The London Pride apology can be seen here; the police apology can be seen here. And unfortunately, I have to say that I’m pretty unimpressed with either of them.
Frankly, the Pride apology reeks of arse-covering. They claim to be apologetic, but then instead of taking responsibility, try to create enough room between them and the incident to deny it. The entire mess is dismissed as a “mistake” on the part of the security company, with no further action to be taken for future years. The incident with the LGBT liaison officer demanding GRCs from the trans women present is labelled an allegation, and the press release uses the lovely language “…all legislation in relation to Trans”. I am not a “trans”, you ignorant fucks. The rest of the press release amounts to an “I’m sorry you were offended”, with a healthy dose of “please Roz Kaveney don’t hate us” thrown in, which really does pose the question of how they would have reacted if one of the more well known and influential trans activists in the UK hadn’t been one of the people affected.
The police apology starts with an actually apologetic cover letter from the commander responsible for the police presence at the event. The press release, however, proceeds to blame the women present for “using inappropriate language” and “barging a steward” who had tried to prevent them from using the bathroom, attempts to excuse the behaviour of the LGBT liaison officer on the basis that “their placards were getting in the way”, and tries to suggest that the behaviour of said officer was both laudable and helped the situation. This, not surprisingly, is evidently contested by those present. While Kaveney does state on her blog that the police have been otherwise helpful, the line taken by the police at least publicly seems to be pretty damned disappointing.
I’m sure both organisations are attempting to patch over this mess with the people present privately, but these attempts at a public apology are nothing short of an epic fail, and send a pretty dismal message about the extent to which they give a shit about relations with the trans community.
Yeah, it’s the old “let’s pacify the trannies so that they’ll stop their complaining so that we can go back to begging them for their money and memberships while continuing to slag them off” bullshit. I’ve seen it lots of times before.
And the police response is just total absolute bullshit.
Well, yeah. I’ve come to expect this sort of response from folks like this, but I still find myself disappointed; I’m lucky to have things so good here that these issues almost never emerge in my own life, so on some level I expect that folks elsewhere will get decent treatment. So when I read about such blatant fucking ignorance I find myself going “where the fuck did that come from?”
[…] by Jack Stephens on July 12, 2008 Rebecca blogs: I’m a bit late to this one too, but it warrants some angry words. Unsurprisingly, both the […]
[…] blogs: I’m a bit late to this one too, but it warrants some angry words. Unsurprisingly, both the […]