Outline’s General Manager, Trevor Easton, says the national support organisation is concerned by the online international campaign to ‘drop the T’ from LGBTI. The petition’s creators, a group of gay/bisexual men and women, say they “have come to the conclusion that the transgender community needs to be disassociated from the larger LGB community.” The petition group say they feel the transgender community’s “ideology” is completely different from that of the LGB communities as one is about sexuality and one about gender. Easton says: “As people from the LGBTI community we know what discrimination and hostile people can be like and I have never understood why some of our community will respond in the same way.” He says this is the exact thing the LGBTI community have been challenging society on for years; the discrimination against “any form of diversity, let alone our trans community.” “Our trans community have an extremely hard road in society and need our support!” he says. A counter petition “We stand with trans people - Reject ‘Drop the T’ has now been created on change.org. The petition reads: “We, the undersigned, urge the organisations petitioned by ‘Drop the T’ to disregard their call to disassociate themselves from promoting the issues of trans people alongside the rest of the LGBTQ+ community.” The counter petition has over 1500 supporters compared to the little over 1300 that the original ‘Drop the T’ petition has secured.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Monday, 9th November 2015 - 3:55pm