Actor Mark Gatiss says LGBT+ community should be worried about ISIS and Chechnya— not ‘pronoun debates’

The Sherlock co-creator says the LGBT+ community should be looking at the "bigger picture".

Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss during the BFI & Radio Times TV Festival at BFI Southbank on April 9, 2017 in London, England. Source: Getty Images

Actor and writer Mark Gatiss has shared his thoughts about the priorities of the LGBT+ community on the latest Attitude Heroes podcast.

The Sherlock co-creator insists that the gay community should be “looking at the bigger picture”, pointing at human rights abuses currently occurring in the Middle East and Chechnya.

“What really gets me very worked up these days is that we are losing ourselves sometimes in tiny debates about personal pronouns when the world is on fire and ISIS is throwing people off buildings for being gay,” he says in the podcast.

“And they’re opening f***ing concentration camps in Chechnya. You know, we should be so lucky, we should wake up! And it is an inevitable result of success.

“We are bound together in adversity with a lot of strange bedfellows and the more success you have, the more you start to fall out within it, and start having rows about themselves, as opposed to the bigger picture!”

Twitter users have pointed out that being aware of atrocities committed against the LGBT+ community and recognising and respecting transgender and non-binary identities are not mutually exclusive.

Gatiss has not yet responded to tweets calling out his comments made on the podcast. 


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By Michaela Morgan



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