Charter for Compassion

The Charter for Compassion is a movement which aims to foster compassion in the world. As with the so-called "Non-Violent Communication" (NVC), I have concerns with it - specifically, that it is, rather than elegantly simple, it is dangerously naive, and mainly so because it chooses to be silent on the issue of LGBTIQ people, for whom forced invisibility of this sort is a major cause of mental health problems and ubiquitous discrimination (invisibility is, in fact, a problem for many other groups in society as well - the disabled, minority groups, etc).

What I've written on this movement is towards the end of the following (and I think I wrote something similar earlier, but can't find it):

I recently came across this article on The Wild Hunt, which was basically a reasonable article, I considered: http://wildhunt.org/2014/12/pronouns-and-gender-together-forever.html. Then I started reading the comments, and was reminded why I do not allow comments on my blogs: trolls. I had planned on posting a comment, but most of what I wanted to say had been covered, except that misgendering can and does kill people – around half a dozen trans people I’ve known to some extent have committed suicide because of this and other discrimination in the last quarter century, and I know trans people who have experienced much higher numbers of people committing suicide. The thing that particularly struck me about the comments was that these are people with allegedly connections to more inclusive religions … I sit next to a very nasty person in my day job: conservative (neo-liberal), utterly uninformed, and resistant to any form of consideration of minority groups. He’s not uncommon, sadly, in engineering, and I’ve grown to expect such from too many people in engineering (people who are, in my view, often emotionally incompetent – or worse: one workplace bully from my past comes very close to meeting the definition of psychopath, but that is actually more a reflection on how companies manage human beings), which is why I’m seeking a career change. I’ve come across discrimination in Paganism as well (and elsewhere – such discrimination is why I no longer have anything to do with Spiritualism, and why I do NOT endorse movements like the Charter for Compassion, which has the same sort of head-in-the-sand denial that goes with people who try to avoid identifying gender in the workplace and think that is actually a solution to anything, whereas it is actually such a problem that I am actually actively against such movements because they are agents of the enforced invisibility which is one of the hallmarks of discrimination), but I consider this some of the most blatant and offensive I’ve come across anywhere for some time;

On one of the occasions since then that I've looked at their website, they had some material on LGBTIQ people, but as far as I'm aware, they haven't changed their official position since our email exchange some time ago, which is - in my words - that their trying to work on compassion for all people, and that will also result in compassion for invisible people such as LGBTIQ people in countries which discriminate against, abuse and kill us.

I support true, genuine, mature and understanding compassion. I have to qualify that, as I have experienced neochristian bigots say to me that they were being compassionate while they opposed human rights for LGBTIQ people, or proselytised their lies of a "gay cure". By being silent on such issues, this movement risks allowing such perversions to seep into it. That is naivety.