Rainbow Trap

Rainbow Trap is the first book to foreground the importance of systems - and their associated documents, policies and administrative practices - as a key battleground for LGBTQ equalities in the UK.

Looking across digital and non-digital systems, Guyan investigates six systems - hate crime reporting and the police, dating apps, borders, film and television, the body, and the business world - and exposes a hidden rule book that constructs, categorises and commodifies LGBTQ identities. While many organisations, businesses and workplaces talk a lot about diversity and inclusion, the internal workings of most systems remain unchanged. Efforts to 'fix' broken systems tend to follow a narrow set of options: elevate queer individuals to senior roles, add more 'diverse' people into organisations, acknowledge historical injustices, gather better evidence and address biases. But these solutions aren't working. Whether it is queer families fighting for each parent to be named on their child's birth certificate, lesbian couples offered an inferior selection of mortgage rates, bisexual asylum seekers asked to provide 'proof' of their sexuality, or gay actors forced to out themselves to meet diversity quotas, LGBTQ people encounter systems that are designed around a default person who is cisgender and straight.

Everyone loses when systems repeatedly fail to reflect the world around us and make bad decisions based on biased assumptions. How we choose to engage with these systems - or if we choose to engage - is fundamental to everyone's future.