Deputy Ozanne was previously an adviser to the UK Government, a member of the Archbishops’ Council, and founder of the Ozanne Foundation, which worked with religious organisations around the world to address prejudice and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community.
She was particularly active in the movement for an international ban on pseudo-scientific conversion practices and founded the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition in 2020.
Deputy Ozanne was elected to the States earlier this year, after returning to live in Guernsey, her childhood home, and was included on the Honours List on the recommendation of UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
‘I am deeply humbled to be honoured in this way and am grateful to His Majesty for recognising the importance of my work,’ said Deputy Ozanne.
‘It is critical that we do all we can to highlight the harm that so many LGBT+ people tragically face in settings where they are told that who they are is unacceptable, causing deep psychological trauma due to unbearable levels of self-hatred and shame.
‘I am, therefore, keen to accept this award in the hope that these religious organisations will recognise the seriousness of this issue.’
Deputy Ozanne came out to her friends in 2008 and publicly in 2014. She previously endured conversion practices herself, and she has since worked tirelessly to highlight the risks and damage they cause, especially to young people growing up in certain religious settings.
In 2019, she met Pope Francis, who encouraged her to create an organisation to bring the world’s senior affirming religious leaders together to speak out, and in 2020 she founded the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives, with funding from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Hundreds of senior religious leaders agreed to sign the Declaration for the Sanctity of Life. The first signatory was the late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
Since her election to the States in June, Deputy Ozanne has been appointed to the steering group of the LGBT+ Network for the island’s regional Commonwealth Parliamentary Association group.
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