Can you tell us the main health issues facing Travellers from the LGBTQ community? 

To my eye it would be mental health issues, addictions, and associated problems such as smoking or alcohol-related illnesses and self-inflicted harm.

I am yet to meet a queer traveller who hasn’t had trauma as a result of them being targeted for their queerness and their traveller status. Both identities are things that are targeted negatively by government policy and general societal bigotry and that trauma can lead to unhealthy coping mechanism such as substance dependency and self-harm.

Suicide rates within Traveller communities and queer communities more generally are both way higher than the general population. Imagine how that intersects for queer travellers. Sometimes it really does feel like the entire world is against us and nobody would understand what we have to put up with.

Another issue that is widespread is insecure or sub-par housing. I’m sure you’ve heard some of the horror stories about council-owned sites next to factories and motorways that don’t have adequate sanitation, or flats filled with mould.

I’ve personally experienced a lot of the issues I’ve mentioned here, and the ones I haven’t experienced I’ve witnessed. It’s all depressingly common

 

How can local organisations engage with Travellers who identify as LGBTQ?

Given all the intricacies of different queer and Traveller identities I’m not sure if there is a blanket answer but in general, I’d say that many of us have little trust of official bodies or outsiders, and that will often be because of things we will have experienced in our lives.

Engagement needs to be on our terms. Trust needs to be earned, and it needs to be done ‘with us’ as opposed to ‘to us’ or ‘for us’. Empowerment is key. We don’t need saviours, we need allies for our liberation.

I suppose a bit of advice I could give is to keep intersectionality in mind. We are not separately LGBTQ and GRT (Gypsy, Roma, Traveller), we are both those things at once, and we may face problems not just from society at large, but within our communities too. I’ve faced antagonism from gorger queers just as I’ve faced queerphobia from travellers.

 

What struggles do travellers from LGBTQ community face finding housing? 

When I was renting and had a normal job and I got one of those equalities forms to fill in I never answered honestly. I always put white Irish as my ethnicity, cos if I put Gypsy or Irish Traveller that was a surefire way to never get a reply back.

Even when I had work, I would face comments and judgement for my background once people found out. This isn’t the only reason I’ve had difficulty holding down work, but it certainly doesn’t help. Being trans makes this harder as well. Not having a stable job meant I couldn’t afford rent and I ended up homeless. Landlords sometimes discriminate due to perceived queerness or Traveller status as well.

I’ve heard so many stories from other LGBTQ travellers about discrimination they’ve faced from bosses, landlords, the council, universal credit, DWP, basically every individual or body that plays a key role in if someone is housed or not.

 

What should the Government be doing to ensure travellers from the LGBTQ community are included in policy making? 

Initially I wanted to say, “by leaving us the fuck alone”. So much legislation seems to make it more difficult for us to even be a part of society.

How can our voices be heard if we’re in jail for an “unauthorised encampment”? How can a transgender Traveller have their voice heard by lawmakers who think neither trans people nor travellers should exist? How could we make someone see some sense who won’t even apologise for the “tinker experiment” or deliberately and knowingly ensured no Traveller sites could be established legally in their area?

In both queer and Traveller spaces, we have learned that engagement with the state often ends in tears. Again, imagine the intersections here. Imagine how much apprehension it could fill an LGBTQ Traveller with to have to engage with the government. Even when we try to make our voices heard through the “normal” means it is met by force and repression.

I’ve never seen a bigger political mobilisation of GRT people than in opposition to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) bill during the kill the bill/drive to survive campaigns, and every protest I went to saw people smacked up by police and arrested on spurious grounds. My brother (also an LGBTQ Traveller) is in jail for the peaceful protest in Bristol that was turned into a riot by the police deciding to start smashing everyone’s heads in.

Travellers were specifically targeted for arrest in that instance, and I can tell you from knowing people personally that many of those arrested and imprisoned as a result are LGBTQ. How are we supposed to be listened to when a queer Traveller even trying to protest peacefully is seen as a threat that needs to be escalated to violence?

Despite every GRT group coming out with spirited opposition to the bill, despite even most of the police officers themselves saying they didn’t want the powers, it passed, with only some changes made as a result of a challenge in the Lords. If our voices were listened to, that bill would not have become an act, no riots would have occurred, nobody from our community would be in jail over it.

On a more conciliatory note, the government can start by not tolerating racism and queerphobia from their own lawmakers and officials.

Treat us like humans and not fauna, give even the slightest shite, and remove people like Eric Pickles from any position of any consequence. It makes my blood boil knowing that the person in charge of holocaust remembrance in the UK Memorial Foundation, Eric Pickles, is a man found by a British court to have illegally discriminated against Romani people and travellers while a government minister in 2015. And his job now is to lead commemorations of a genocide where the majority of Romani people in Europe were massacred. That right there is just emblematic of how little a fuck the government gives about us.

Ultimately though, it really does come down to extending offers to engage in the process and actually listening to us. I have little to no hope of this ever happening. I feel like we will only ever be listened to or able to craft our own destinies politically outside of the system, preferably in a world where it doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe the ultimate answer here would be “maybe the government can help LGBTQ travellers by no longer existing”.