Today, there are 64 Members of Parliament who are LGBT+. Tomorrow, when Parliament dissolves ahead of the General Election on 4 July, there will be none.
How many will there be in total when the next Parliament forms a few days later? I’ve no idea, but with your help, we can figure it out.
Since 2017, I’ve been maintaining a public registry of members of the UK Parliament who are openly LGBT+1.
It’s not just a list; it’s a live list. It is designed to show who is LGBT+ at the moment you’re looking at it.
I’ve written before about why I created this dataset. It started out of work-related necessity. Now I’m keeping track because people have seem to find it useful. The dataset has been used by the BBC, Sky News, the United Nations, and others, and about 1,000 people a month visit the website.
A big task ahead
There is a lot of work to do over the next couple of months to keep this dataset up-to-date and complete.
The task in front of me is to check:
- whether any current LGBT+ MPs are standing down
- which current LGBT+ MPs are standing again for election, and whether they get re-elected
- every newly elected MP and whether any of them are LGBT+
On top of all that, there are constituency boundary changes too, so even if an MP is returning to Parliament, their constituency might have changed.
Oh boy, is there a lot of work to do!
Can you help?
If you know an MP in the upcoming Parliament is LGBT+ and you have a reliable public source to back that up, I need you!
I’ve set up 3 new online forms to gather data about new, returning or leaving LGBT+ MPs. You’ll need a free Github account to use them.
- Suggest an MP to add the dataset
- Suggest an MP to remove from the dataset
- Update an MP that is already in the dataset
If you’re struggling with the forms, you can also email me at data@whoare.lgbt.
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By LGBT+, I mean the broadest possible definition of the term; lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans, or any other minority sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or variation of sex characteristics. ↩︎