Section 28 Didn't End in 2003: It Followed Me Into Adulthood
The Section 28 Justice Coalition is a volunteer-led campaign group whose central aim is a public inquiry into the impact of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. This law from 1988 to 2003 barred local authorities and schools from "promoting" homosexuality, leaving a generation of LGBTQIA+ people without support, information, or safety.
As part of this work, the Coalition runs the Dear Section 28 project, which is collecting an archive of personal testimony from people affected by the law. Here is my letter.
Dear Section 28
I am 38 years old as I write this. The British Government and Section 28 stole years of my life. From the age of 4, when I started entering the education system, until 18, when I left it, you silenced me, and you took many children’s lives. When I left formal education, you have never stopped taking from me, and that needs to end today.
I have felt your impact at every stage of my education: primary school, secondary school, and college. You didn't just fail to help me. You made sure no one was allowed to. I hate you.
No words
By the age of 4, I already knew I was a boy trapped in a girl's body, though I had no language to explain what I felt. By 9, I knew I liked girls. By 13, I knew I liked boys too. It would take years after your repeal in 2003 before I finally found all the words for that: bisexual and transgender.
You made sure there were no words available to us in school, no way to find the others like us, no way to know we weren't alone. I was made to feel like the only person in the entire school system who felt this way about their gender and sexuality. No teacher offered support. No lesson offered information. No representation. You made silence into policy, and isolation into its outcome.
It wasn't until I left school at 16 that I discovered there were people like me at all. I found them at college, where my entire A-level year group turned out to be LGBTQIA+. Every one of us had left our schools because every one of us had felt isolated, alone, and misunderstood. Some had been relentlessly bullied by students and by teachers alike, and college was where they had gone to escape it.
What we built ourselves
It was my classmates in college who taught me I wasn't alone, not a single teacher. Together we built the safe spaces you never gave us, and in them we pooled the minimal knowledge we had about sexuality and gender, piece by piece, because no one else would give it to us. I had boyfriends and girlfriends there, and felt, for the first time, something close to accepted.
But even then, we knew the rules you had taught us without ever saying them aloud: never hold hands in college. Never tell a teacher. Never tell anyone outside our year group. We knew it was dangerous, because school had already shown us exactly how dangerous it could be.
The silence that followed me into adulthood
The absence of words and information you left behind didn't end when I finished education. It followed me. When I was 21, I finally found the courage to tell an NHS psychologist how I felt about my gender. I was told it "does not matter" and forbidden ever to bring up the subject again. I had no words to defend myself, no language to fight for my own autonomy, and so I said nothing more about it for the next 13 years.
That silence pushed me into a closet I built around me, because you had left me no other option and taught me that was what the British public wanted from me. Inside it, I spent over a decade experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault, and financial abuse at the hands of a cisgender, heterosexual man. It took everything I had to leave. In the end, I had to run in fear with no possessions for my safety.
Finding my way out
I was fortunate enough, afterward, to find love with a cisgender pansexual man who saw who I truly was and slowly helped me dismantle the mental prison you and my abuser had forced me into together. With him, I finally began to learn the words. I finally began trying to be fully myself.
That healing stood in direct opposition to what the UK wanted for me. As bigotry rose again in the UK and I knew it was time to leave, so I did. From afar, I have watched the news and cried myself to sleep, witnessing one of my safe spaces as a teenager be burnt to the ground by a cisgender man; the current Labour government's hate-filled rhetoric on trans people; and its refusal to challenge EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces that breaches basic human rights. I have panic attacks, feeling like I have been pulled back into the years of Section 28. I promised myself I would never go back to the UK; it has become a fascist state I want no part of. I am scared for LGBTQIA+ people still living in the UK.
My new country is what I consider my home country now (though not in a legal sense), and it is where I have felt a sense of safety I have never experienced in the UK. My new home fully embraces who I am. It has given me the words and the support I needed to process everything you took from me. It has given me access to life-saving gender care. My bisexuality is no longer a secret I have to keep.
The government's response
On 18 August 2026, the government responded to the petition calling for a public inquiry into your impact. It acknowledged that you caused devastating harm. It listed, at length, the equality laws passed since your repeal. And then the Labour government refused to hold an inquiry, because your "origins and motivations are already on the public record" and that an inquiry "would not establish any new facts."
That response is dismissive of everyone who has lived through and continues to live through your impact.
An inquiry was never going to be about establishing that you existed, or when Parliament passed you, or which minister signed off on you. That much, yes, is already recorded. What is not on record, what no transcript or Cabinet Office briefing can capture, is what you did to individual lives, one child, one classroom, one silence at a time.
My story is not on the public record. Neither are the thirteen years I spent unable to say who I am to medical professionals, because you had already taught me that no one wanted to hear it and trained the staff through your existence that an individual's gender and sexuality should “not matter” to that individual. Neither is the decade I spent trapped with an abuser, because you had made sure I had no language, no community, and no confidence to imagine anything else was possible for me. Those facts do not exist anywhere until people like me are asked to give them, under the weight and protection that a public inquiry provides.
The government's own response undermines its own conclusion. It admits you "discouraged professionals from sharing clear information about sexuality, relationships and sexual health." It admits the culture of fear you created continued "following its repeal." It even points to LGBTQIA+ people still facing barriers to healthcare and continued hate crime today. If your effects are still being managed by government departments in 2026, then you are not history. You are not a settled fact. You are an ongoing injury, and ongoing injuries deserve investigation, not a list of unrelated achievements offered in your place.
A public inquiry is needed because:
The facts that matter most were never written down.
"Past" is doing a lot of work it hasn't earned.
Accountability is not the same as commemoration.
Without an inquiry, there is no mechanism for redress.
The current climate shows exactly why the lesson hasn't been learned.
To call an inquiry unnecessary because the story is already known is to decide, on our behalf, that our individual experiences do not count as evidence. I am telling you that they do. This letter is one small piece of the record the government says already exists. It does not. Not until someone is willing to sit down, listen, and write it down properly.
What I want you to know
I should not have had to leave my own country to be safe in my own body. I should not have had to wait 34 years to say the words I am a bisexual transgender man, and I am worthy of love. A four-year-old should never have had their future taken away from them as soon as they started education.
You didn't just take away information. You took away the years I needed to become myself, safely, among people who could have helped me, and you left a silence that a government is still choosing to extend today.
