When the Sexual Offences Act (1967) was passed by the UK parliament, homosexual acts between men were partially decriminalised. Initially, the law only applied in England and Wales (decriminalisation was extended to Scotland in 1980, and to Northern Ireland in 1982), and only applied to men over the age of 21 (the age of consent for homosexuals acts was lowered to 18 in 1984, and then in 2000 was harmonised with the age of consent for heterosexual acts, at 16), and did not apply to men serving in the armed forces (although it was extended to include them in 2000). Homosexual acts between women were never legally prohibited in the UK and therefore did not need to be decriminalised. This Act formed part of a slew of progressive legislation in the late 1960s, which also included the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of capital punishment, and the relaxation of the divorce laws, all championed by the Labour Party’s then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins.
Not everyone in British politics welcomed the advent of the permissive society. In the mid-1980s public anxiety about the spread of AIDS provided the chance for opponents of liberalisation to campaign for new laws that proscribed ‘the promotion’ of homosexuality. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, required that local authorities in England, Wales, and Scotland shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, nor should they promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. While many local government employees and many teachers worried about the meaning of the term “promotion” – did buying copies of books by Oscar Wilde for libraries count as promotion? What about playing music by Benjamin Britten? Was visiting Hadrian’s Wall problematic? – many UK newspapers conducted aggressive and intrusive reporting of the lives and behaviour of well-known gay men. It appeared, for a short time, that twenty years of progress had been reversed.
Section 28 was eventually repealed in 2003 – despite determined resistance in the House of Lords by some members of the Conservative Party and some church leaders – and the following year the Labour Party introduced the Civil Partnership Act (2004) that allowed same-sex couples to participate in a ceremony that created a legally recognised relationship comparable to marriage. A decade later, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act (2013), which allowed homosexual men and women to marry their same-sex partners. Fifty years previously, men could be sent to prison for having sex with each other in the privacy of their own homes, but now they could marry each other in public spaces. According to the annual British Public Attitudes Survey, while in 1987 around 75% of British people thought that homosexuality was mostly or always wrong, up from around 60% a decade earlier, by 2013 that figure had fallen to below 35%. In 2023, an opinion poll in the UK found that 78% of the population supported same-sex marriage.
There is an interesting question here concerning the extent to which legislators in democracies should run ahead of public opinion. In the 1960s there was a growing sense that the state should leave matters of sexual preference and family life to individuals, allowing for more choice and less restriction, but this was not yet the majority view. For many years after capital punishment was abolished, polls showed a majority of voters in favour of bringing back the death penalty. It took, perhaps, two generations for the public to catch up with the progressive legislation of that era. This disconnect between public opinion and legislation accounts for the frequent stumbling, stuttering nature of social progress: a bold step forward for equal rights in the late ‘60s did not lead to continuous progress towards social acceptance and toleration for homosexual men. Rather, those who held traditional views of family life spent more than twenty years fighting to overturn the legislation, and for a while they were partially successful.
I remember marching around London in 1988 with gay friends, protesting against Section 28, and feeling their strong sense of bewilderment and betrayal that hard won legal and social protections were now being taken away from them. Losing rights that had only recently been granted appeared far worse than not having those rights at all: it seemed more personal somehow, not just to be the passive victim of the dead weight of tradition but to be the direct object of a contemporary campaign that sought to deny your right to equal treatment.
And yet, for all the temporary heartache, it remains true that in my lifetime the most remarkable social change has taken place. Gay men can kiss in public without fear of arrest, they can marry, they can adopt children, and they can pass assets to their partners at the time of their death with legal security. In addition, in the media and society more widely, they are for the most part accepted as normal and not forced to hide their sexuality for fear of losing their jobs or being discriminated against. My friends tell me that there are still some places where it is difficult to come out, for example in some male professional sports, but overall their world seems to have changed profoundly for the better.
For those who from time to time despair about the state of the world, and fear that all the progressive causes are in retreat, it is worth remembering that the 1980s were merely a temporary impediment to the growth of a more tolerant and inclusive society. And there was something charming and gratifying, for those of us who cheered for Peter Tatchell in Bermondsey in 1983, that thirty years later same-sex marriage was legalised by a Conservative government.
What, then, can we permissivists hope for today in the UK? What are the causes that seem temporarily blocked and thwarted, but which have long-term momentum behind them, that will – slowly but surely – overcome the resistance of the traditionalists. I see two principal issues: the first, transgender rights, is about allowing people to join in society in the way that makes them feel comfortable; and the second, assisted dying rights, is about allowing people to opt out of society and of life itself, at a time of their own choosing. Were Roy Jenkins alive today, he would no doubt be drafting the necessary legislation to embed these rights in law, ready to be implemented by the next government that is brave enough once again to champion the permissive society.
In the ninth book of his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Iphis, born a girl but brought up as a boy, who falls in love with Ianthe and is engaged to marry her. On the eve of the wedding, in response to his mother’s prayers, Iphis is transformed into a man by the goddess Isis. This early Cretan example of a successful gender transition reminds us that throughout history and across cultures there have been boys who grew up wanting to be women and girls who grew up wanting to be men. Transvestism – celebrated annually during the UK during pantomime season – is one social mechanism that has allowed individuals visibly to cross the gender boundary, albeit temporarily and reversibly. Today, advances in pharmacology and surgery allow those who wish to, to cross that border in a more permanent way. There are a number of moving accounts – for example, Jan Morris’s memoir Conundrum (1974) – of those who have made this transition, which describe their relief at finally feeling at home in their bodies and able to live authentically. And yet, as recent well-publicised cases in the UK have demonstrated, those who have changed – or who wish to change – their birth gender are often treated badly at work, and are frequently made the target of attack by defenders of the traditional social order.
Some people do not want to change their bodies they want to abandon them altogether, because they want to abandon life itself. There are many reasons why people commit suicide, a few of which might seem melodramatic or foolish, but most of which are the result of careful and serious reflection. Suicide is no longer illegal in the UK, but providing assistance to someone to end their own life is a crime, with a penalty of up to fourteen years imprisonment. Legislation to permit assisted dying, under strict conditions – the individual must be mentally competent, must have a terminal illness, must be judged to have fewer than six months to live, and must be able to self-administer the medicine – has recently been debated in UK Parliament. Despite strong support in the elected chamber, the proposal was blocked by delaying tactics in the appointed chamber, which means that in the UK anyone who has a terminal illness and who wishes to end their life before the onset of the worst pain and incapacity, must continue to find a way to kill themselves without the assistance of loved ones, and without the supervision of medical professionals.
Those who oppose these extensions of legal rights – whether to change gender or to assist a suicide – seem to do so for two sorts of reason. First, there are some people who oppose public policies that allow social change because they are convinced that things were better in the past, when life was much more straightforward and people were encouraged to fit in with the status quo without complaint. They think that protests about the restrictive nature of traditional values are mostly faddish and ill-conceived. The problem with this view is that society has always been far more diverse and unstable than rose-tinted memories allow: as Ovid’s book of tales remind us (as well as the story of Iphis, there are fifteen human suicides in his book), these issues have been around for as long as humans have been around. In fact, earlier societies were often more tolerant – more permissive – in certain respects than today.
Second, there are those who have firm ideological objections to the crossing of gender boundaries or providing support to those determined to take their own lives. Sometimes these are religious beliefs, to which the polite but firm response should be that in a modern, secular society religious belief and affiliation is a choice, and that religious values should not be forced upon those who do not share them. To those who appeal not to god’s laws but to the laws of nature, the equally firm retort should be that so much of human life is unnatural – clothes, mobile phones, money, websites – that it seems odd to condemn certain behaviours on these grounds while happily embracing all of society’s many other non-natural characteristics.
A society that is built on respect and shared rights for all should welcome those who find their birth sex a burden, and who wish to alter their gender to find a way of joining in social life that makes better sense to them. And it should respectfully allow those who no longer wish to live – who do not wish to suffer pain in the final stages of a fatal illness, and who would like their family or friends to help ease them into death – to opt out with dignity. Legislation to embed new rights needs to include appropriate protections: to ensure that individuals are capable of making decisions which would have an irreversible impact on their lives; that they are not pressured by others into making decisions that they might not wholly desire; and that the exercise of rights by some does not cause clear harm to others. These protections would be no different in kind or degree from the constraints on freedoms that are already accepted as part of normal social relations: that age and mental capacity need to be established for the safe exercise of rights, that we do not have the right to coerce others to act in ways that are against their interests, and that freedom of action by some must take into account the potential impacts on others.
As Ovid showed us, two thousand years ago, we live in a world that is ever-changing. The challenge is to ensure that these changes make our lives better and not worse. While progress on transgender rights and assisted dying rights seems to have been temporarily frustrated by the opposition of the traditionalists, so too did progress on gay rights back in 1988. The great social lesson of my lifetime is that apparent reverses in the path towards an inclusive and tolerant society are merely temporary. I am quietly confident that in the near future, more people than ever will be able to live free and equal lives just as they wish; and be free to bring those lives to an end at a time of their choosing, just as they wish; and that these freedoms will quickly become accepted as normal by the vast majority of the population.