I find Pride in healthcare difficult to write about without sounding like every organisation in June.

The words are familiar by now. Visibility. Inclusion. Safety. Belonging. None of them are wrong. A badge, a poster, a pronoun, or a small change in wording can make someone feel less guarded in a consultation.

But the easy part is saying the right thing. 
 
The harder part is noticing the assumptions that sit underneath ordinary healthcare. Who we imagine the patient is. Who we imagine their partner is. What kind of family we think they have. What we assume they are comfortable saying. What we think is relevant, and what we quietly decide is not. 

Medicine likes to think of itself as neutral. I am not sure it is. At its best, medicine is disciplined, evidence-based and humane. But neutral? Not always. Sometimes what we call neutral is just the old default, left unexamined.

That matters because doctors ask people intrusive questions as part of normal practice. We ask about sex, relationships, periods, pregnancy, fertility, trauma, safeguarding, domestic abuse, mental health, family, risk and death. We ask quickly. We ask in imperfect spaces. We ask with relatives nearby. We ask when patients may already feel exposed.
 
The assumption behind the question matters. Asking ‘Do you have a partner?’ instead of assuming a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife is not some brave progressive intervention. It’s basic clinical competence. It lets the patient answer without first having to decide whether to correct us, protect themselves, or just let the assumption pass. 

Patients notice more than we think. They notice the wording. They notice what is written down. They notice the pause after they answer. They notice whether the clinician becomes awkward, overly careful, curious in the wrong way, or simply carries on. 
 
For LGBTQIA+ patients, especially young people, trans and non-binary people, disabled patients, migrants, people from faith communities, and people who have already had poor experiences with healthcare, disclosure is not always a simple act of honesty. It can be a risk assessment. 
 
This is why I get impatient when inclusive care is treated as a separate, softer thing, somewhere outside ‘real medicine’. It is real medicine. It affects history-taking, safeguarding, sexual health, mental health, fertility discussions, domestic abuse assessment, medication counselling and trust. These are not side issues. They are routine parts of care. The same is true for staff, although we often talk about it less plainly. 
 
LGBTQIA+ healthcare workers do not mainly experience Pride through campaigns. We experience it in mess rooms, handovers, corridors, rota discussions, conferences, committees and WhatsApp groups.

We notice whether partners are spoken about normally. Whether comments are challenged when it would be easier not to. Whether trans colleagues are defended clearly, rather than hidden behind careful procedural language. Whether people understand that not every doctor’s life follows the same assumed pattern.

And whether being visible gives you any standing or just makes you useful for the diversity paragraph.

That is where the BMA matters. Not because it needs another Pride statement, but because it is supposed to understand power at work. Pay, contracts, rota safety, bullying, discrimination, representation, who gets heard, who gets dismissed: these are not separate universes. They all influence whether  doctors are treated as people with standing in the profession. 
 
Equality is not a side issue to dignity at work. It is part of it. 
 
Pride also needs honesty about its own umbrella. LGBTQIA+ people are not one neat community with one neat story. A gay doctor, an asexual doctor, a trans patient, a queer migrant doctor, a disabled lesbian patient, a non-binary medical student, an older closeted patient from a conservative family. These are not interchangeable experiences. 
 
Some identities are easier for institutions to process. Some are made palatable. Some are still mocked, medicalised, sexualised, or explained away. Some people are visible but not heard. Some are discussed constantly but rarely given power. 

That should bother us more than it does. 

The NHS likes talking about diversity. To be fair, it is built on it. Different countries, cultures, classes, faiths, accents, histories, identities and ways of seeing the world. That difference is not a problem to be managed. It is part of what keeps the system functioning.

 But if the only version of diversity we accept is the version that looks good in a campaign, then we are not really talking about inclusion. We are talking about branding. 
 
Pride should change what happens in the room. The assumption we catch. The question we ask differently. The colleague we defend when it is awkward. The patient we believe without making them perform their credibility first. 
 
Otherwise, it is just the annual machinery of saying the right thing. 

Mohit Bhagia (he/him) is an incoming national council representative