In December 2022, it felt like Scotland was leading the way across the UK in advancing rights for LGBTQ+ people. It had just passed the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRR), which would have allowed self-declaration for trans people to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate. This was the latest in a line of momentous progressive legislation passed after devolution in 1999, with prominent politicians such as former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon being very clear about their support for advancing LGBTQ+ rights.
Since then, it feels like this progress has stalled and started regressing. The GRR Bill was blocked by the UK government. And then in April 2025, the Scottish government found itself on the losing side of a case brought to the UK Supreme Court by the ‘gender critical’ campaigning organisation For Women Scotland, which led the court to define ‘sex’ as biological sex for the interpretation of legislation.
While these issues about the basic rights of LGBTQ+ people, and especially trans people, were being debated and legislated on, another profound change was happening in Scotland – the devolution of a substantial number of social security benefits from the UK government to the Scottish government, a process begun under the Scotland Act 2016. This reform included replacing Personal Independence Payment (PIP) (the allowance for disabled people to support the extra costs of everyday life) with Adult Disability Payment (ADP) from 2023, based on principles of rights and dignity.
Our newly published paper ‘Progressive for all? The experience of LGBTQ+ people in the Scottish social security system’ uses qualitative data from over 100 LGBTQ+ benefit claimants across Great Britain, collected between 2021 and 2023, to address the question of whether claimants had a better experience accessing social security in a country which openly supported LGBTQ+ rights, and had a social security system designed around rights and dignity.
Signs of improvement
Among participants in Scotland, it was clear that political leadership on LGBTQ+ rights mattered. Many expressed greater trust in the Scottish government compared to the UK government, which several felt had become increasingly hostile, particularly towards trans people. This perception shaped expectations of the social security system and willingness to engage with it.
For those who had begun interacting with ADP, experiences were generally more positive than those reported for PIP. Participants described interactions with Social Security Scotland staff as more respectful, and processes as more straightforward. In two cases, individuals made significant life decisions in response to the new system: one moved from England to Scotland to claim ADP, while another delayed making a claim until the new benefit became available.
These accounts suggest that policy design grounded in dignity and rights can have tangible effects, not only on claimant experience, but on trust, behaviour and engagement with the system.
Persistent barriers in everyday interactions
However, these improvements are only part of the story. Across the full dataset, one of the most common ways LGBTQ+ people experienced discrimination was not through overt hostility, but through the everyday operation of heteronormativity and cisnormativity – the assumption that being heterosexual and cisgender is the norm.
These assumptions were embedded in both administrative systems and frontline interactions. Participants described staff presuming that partners were of a different gender, or systems that only recognised binary gender categories.
As one participant, Esmond, explained when describing interactions with the system:
If you say, like, “Oh it’s my partner”, “Right, tell me her name”. It’s not like, just, “Tell me their name”… For me, I just roll my eyes… they’ve obviously not had the training or they’ve not got the back up… they’ve just messed up really. (Esmond, 36, Fife, Gay, They/He)
Similarly, another participant described how their child’s disability benefit claim used the child’s deadname, with no obvious way to correct it. These experiences highlight how even in a system designed to be inclusive, routine practices and administrative norms can reproduce exclusion.
What does ‘progressive’ mean in practice?
Taken together, our findings point to a mixed picture. Scotland’s devolved social security system shows early signs of delivering a better experience for LGBTQ+ people. The emphasis on dignity and rights matters, not only symbolically, but in shaping interactions on the ground.
These findings have implications beyond Scotland. As debates about social security reform continue across the UK, they highlight the importance of designing systems that recognise and respond to diversity in people’s lives. A welfare system grounded in dignity and respect is not only beneficial for LGBTQ+ claimants, but improves accessibility and fairness for everyone. Achieving this requires attention to the details of how systems work in practice: how questions are asked, how categories are defined and how staff are trained.
Our findings also highlight the importance of political leadership in challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, and openly supporting progressive change. More concerningly, with the rise of the populist far-right, and the rolling back of rights for trans people following the Supreme Court decision in April 2025, this does seem to be lacking in Pride Month 2026.
Eleanor Formby is Professor of Sociology and Youth Studies at the Sheffield Hallam University.
Lee Gregory is Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.
Peter Matthews is Professor of Social Policy & LGBTQ+ Studies at the University of Stirling.
Progressive for all? The experience of LGBTQ+ people in the Scottish social security system by Lee Gregory, Eleanor Formby and Peter Matthews is available to read open access in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice on Bristol University Press Digital.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Bristol University Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Aiden Craver via Unsplash