Former Scottish Labour leader Dugdale warns of ‘fragile’ progress on LGBT rights

Scotland’s progress in LGBT rights is “fragile”, former Labour leader Kezia Dugdale has insisted, as she revealed she will check her surroundings “every single time” before holding her wife’s hand in public.

Dugdale, now associate director at Glasgow University’s Centre for Public Policy, married SNP Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth in 2022.

Writing in the Scottish Sun On Sunday, Dugdale said: “It’s been 10 years since the Scottish Parliament followed the UK Parliament and allowed same-sex couples to marry and I’m one of the 10,000-odd Scots people who have used that right given to me by law.”

But despite saying Scotland has made “incredible” progress over the last 25 years as “gay people like me felt safer and more emboldened to live our lives openly”, she also stressed that progress is “fragile”.

She said the change 10 years ago to allow same-sex couples to tie the knot had “delivered equality” and showed gay people “are not something different, something other, something less”.

She insisted ten years of equal marriage “is a real milestone in our country’s recent history because it shows us how much progress we’ve made”.

But Dugdale added: “Progress is fragile. Ask yourself if you’ve ever paused to check your surroundings before holding your partner’s hand on a night out. I still do – every single time.”

While she voted for the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act at Holyrood a decade ago, she said to her “shame” she was not “out” at the time.

She added: “I was one of the 129 MSPs who voted on the legislation back in 2014 and I did so from the depths of my closet.

“To my shame now, I wasn’t out because I didn’t think I could be. I thought there would be a professional price paid for talking about who I loved and who I wanted to be with.”

She said she made that decision after “growing up with the Aids crisis on the TV and the vilification of gay people that came with it”, but added that in contrast now, “gay characters in soap operas are 10 a penny” and “schools have LGBT clubs where kids are encouraged and supported to be who they are”.

Dugdale said: “It’s light years of progress, but it doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by the passage of acts of law like the Equal Marriage Act.”