Pride is ‘more important’ in areas like Caithness to show LGBTQ+ young people they don’t have to leave Highlands to be who they are, says Dr Emma Miller
Having worked for decades to move to Scotland from the United States of America, Dr Emma Miller knows a thing or two about uprooting your entire life – but she hopes that Caithness Pride will show young people in the region that they do not have to leave to be who they are.
Dr Miller always knew that Scotland was the end goal, regularly visiting after studying in Edinburgh and Glasgow the best part of 20 years ago.
Moving to Caithness then allowed her to live her “little Highland dream”, and it feels like a match made in heaven.
However, as part of the LGBTQ+ community she did have some reservations, only to find a “live and let live” approach among Scots that she sees as both a positive and a negative when it comes to generating social progress.
“I wanted to move to a country that was more liberal, and had a better foundation in human rights – especially with the LGBTQ+ community and immigrant community,” she explained.
“It has been a little bit heart-breaking that it hasn’t gone the way I would have liked in recent years, but it’s still better than America.
“The expectation was that I’d meet a few people that I felt safe and happy with, and be a homebody outside of that, but it has been better than I thought it would be.
“I have a progress pride flag in my window, and nobody has ever said anything about it, but there’s also this Scottish thing where people just let everybody get on with their own business.
“It’s not 100 per cent tolerance and acceptance, but it is different from what you sometimes see in the States where they don’t want to let you exist even if you’re existing privately. Some folks want to be civil and just disagree, but we can’t really disagree about someone’s right to exist – that’s not political, that’s not an opinion, that’s just hatred.
“In one of the rural communities in America I lived in they were calling for people to get their guns because if the Black Lives Matter crowd stepped on to their land they could shoot people.
“Here the element of just letting people be is safer, and it’s something you can slowly work with and hopefully grow into something better, but it doesn’t always do much for visibility and it can be a way to keep your head in the sand and not learn and engage, so it’s a mixed bag.”
Dr Miller knows all about the importance of visibility, having felt unable to come out as a lesbian until just a few years ago.
Some of that was a hesitancy to label herself, and a struggle to recognise where she would fit in to the LGBTQ+ community when conversations and presentations around them were hyper-sexualised.
Meeting and becoming friends with other lesbians, though, showed her what a queer life could be like, and she slowly began to realise it was a label she had no reason to shy away from.
“Since I started thinking about dating, I said I would hope that if I fell in love with someone their genitals wouldn’t matter,” Dr Miller recalled.
“I didn’t then say I was queer because of that, I was just me. I had the same attitude when it came to religion, so I have always been label-defiant. I have an anti-conformity impulse.
“In my mid to late-20s, I realised that I was performing heteronormative desire that had nothing to do with actual desire. It was me needing to feel valuable to men, because that was the currency for young women that you were always trying to get, and once you got it you didn’t want it.
“After the Me Too movement I was totally done with men. I thought I was asexual and didn’t do relationships, and I just wanted to hang out with all my friends, then I kind of realised a few years ago that all of these girl crushes I had were actual crushes.
“I had experimented before in college, and I just kept ignoring all of that because I didn’t want to claim anything or set anything in stone and do the difficult part of telling people. Making that statement felt too fixed and final.
“A few years ago it got to a point where I was wondering if I was gay enough to claim being a part of the community, and I had felt that way for 15 years. Am I queer enough, or just a really good ally?
“Part of that is because 20 years ago queerness placed this really big emphasis on sex, and for a long time libido and lust seemed to be at the heart of things. That didn’t feel true to me either, so there was a lot of self-doubt about whether I was queer enough to be in the community and not just on the sidelines.
“As the community shifted, and as I met and hung out with more lesbians and talked more about what that kind of attraction is like, and saw more of what those relationships look like, there is so much more involved in sexual attraction than bits and bobs.
“Being attracted to gender, and not caring very much about the body, I think is quite anti-patriarchal. The patriarchy puts so much emphasis on what you look like, and I find women attractive in looks and body shapes that I’ve been told all my life aren’t attractive.
“Dealing with all of that, I think, is why I didn’t listen to myself and found other ways to label what it was I was feeling. I overcame my block with time and growth, and now I say I’m a lesbian.”
Dr Miller has worked in education for years, both in the USA and in Scotland, and obviously crossed the Atlantic Ocean to sample higher education in different countries.
She believes that the perception of the LGBTQ+ community she felt in her younger days has shifted, but things like the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman has turned focus in a different direction.
That ruling hit Dr Miller hard – to the extent that she is not dismissing the idea of leaving the UK – and she would like to see higher education establishments be braver in sending out more inclusive messages to the young people in their care.
“Having worked at or been a student at nine or 10 universities, from Panama to a whole bunch in America to three in Scotland, in general I think that higher education needs to do a lot better to commit to values of inclusivity – even at the risk of freedom of speech lawsuits,” she said.
“Education has a social and moral obligation to lead in this area, take these risks and tell society about the way forward, because education is there to help people learn and advance.
“The UK Supreme Court ruling has no basis in science. Academics have been saying that sex is not binary for so long, so why is that clamour not louder?
“The ruling has hit me really had. I gave up a lot to move to Scotland, and the reason I wanted to come here was because it was more liberal, and now I am really terrified of where the country is headed.
“One of the things in the EHRC interim guidance defined lesbians as only biological females who loved other biological females. I finally took on a label, and I was really happy about that, and all of a sudden the government is telling me I’m not a lesbian because I could fall in love with a trans woman. That’s not for the government to decide.
“All of a sudden, if I decide to marry a trans woman, I’m straight according to the government, which is disgusting. The queer community puts their life on the line to be able to identify as queer, and now they are taking that from us.
“Obviously, for all my trans friends, it’s hugely horrific and dangerous, but it’s not just a trans issue, it’s all of us. You go after one of us, you go after all of us, so for me it is the single most terrifying governmental thing that has come out since I came here.
“I’m thinking I might have to move again – not from a safety point of view, but for my own moral principles, and that’s devastating. I have worked my whole life to be able to move here, but I can’t willingly be part of a nation that holds these beliefs.”
While Dr Miller believes higher education facilities could be doing more, on an individual level she is playing her part by helping organise the first ever Pride March in Caithness this weekend.
That, she hopes, will give some solace to people who are struggling with the feeling of constant attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
“The other day I just wept – in a good way – because of the work that has been done,” she added.
“Through Pride coming, and Stepping Out, I have learned how many queer people there are in Caithness. There are tons, and I had no idea, I thought I was close to the only one.
“Tons of allies are showing up and working really hard as well which is amazing because everybody gets to celebrate and show love. I’ve heard the feeling of isolation echoed among so many of the people I’ve met, because everybody thought it was really straight up here, but we’re now all seeing that we can come out of our houses and be just as normal as anyone.
“Being rural increases all those feelings of isolation, and you get more people thinking about suicide with less resources to help them, so you could almost say that Pride is more necessary in these small places – it may be the only thing you see in a whole year that makes you feel like it’s okay.
“I’m really excited. I have to think that the visibility will make young people think that they can stay and don’t have to flee to the cities – they can be safe here and find love here.
“I don’t know how much it will do to silence hate, but what it will do is show that the rest of the world doesn’t feel that way. There may always be haters, but they are the outsiders, which is a really strong feeling for young people to have.”