Beechgrove Garden inclusivity.

[Karensalright]

Liked this programme as a bit quirky and old fashioned in its ways up In the challenging environment of Scotland.

So tonight we had a lovely segment on the Afghan community allotment project followed, and how they were growing food that they. Traditionally eat, some of which i had not heard of.

Then bugger me we have a segment on LGBTQ gardening???? Well Q actually.

They had nothing to offer in terms of gardening tips, or what they actually grew, just a bit of, well i dunno really, hello we are here, and gardening can be queer.

What has your dress sense, and identity have to do with gardening.

Did anyone else see it?

I did and bloody hell, didn't they push the whole queer thing. It was really quite irritating.

Although I liked the ethos of their cooperative I felt that the segment didn't really fit in with the rest of Beechgrove.

Me and Mr Veg had a thing a few years ago when our main client asked about the 'gender' of a plant. We both automatically shouted 'Sex not gender!'. Fortunately the man just laughed.

Plants are plants, they are not 'queer'.

Many Gay men and Lesbians are fed up of Pride being hijacked by the TQ.

I was involved in a community garden decades ago, with lesbian, gay and trans people I guess statistically speaking very overrepresented. Maybe there's a history to community gardens being places where social acceptance came ahead of the rest of society?

It will no doubt depend on the community garden. I was involved in setting up one a while back and as part of that we went to numerous other gardens to see how they were established and run. There were no trans people, no pronouns, and the members appeared to be primarily straight. A lot of emphasis of the importance of the gardens on health and wellbeing and on community cohesion - LGBetc wasn’t even mentioned.

Watched the segment, it's a cooperative garden set up by a few people (probably quite new to gardening) who are going on about discrimination they think they will face (if they had any knowledge of gardening and community gardens they would know that this wouldn't be the case).

No doubt there will be a lot of "queer" people joining because they like the idea of a communal garden.

You can see how some people think their sexuality is WHO they are, not just WHAT they are. And it's disappointing that they are self-isolating, pre-assuming discrimination, instead of just going to a community garden and see how they get on. I suppose people not going on about pronouns would be a micro-aggression to them.

There is no need for a safe green space for LGBTQ+ when green spaces already are.

It's rather sad really that these people, many of them rather young, are so convinced that so many "spaces" aren't safe. I think some are really convinced of this.

Others are just drama llamas though, wanting everything to be about them.