This morning, LGBT people around the UK woke up to the devastating news that the British electorate, in their infinite wisdom, had overwhelmingly voted to put Boris Johnson back into Number 10. The man who once famously wrote that Peter Mandelson’s resignation would upset “tank-topped bumboys,” who compared gay marriage to marrying a dog, and who attacked “Labour’s appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools,” has been rewarded for his history of bigoted comments—which are well-known to the public—with the largest Conservative majority since 1987.

It was the year after that election when Margaret Thatcher introduced into law amendment commonly referred to simply as Section 28. This notorious piece of regressive legislation banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or “[promoting] the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” After the 1992 election, her successor John Major launched the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, seen by many as an attempt to promote the traditional—in other words, married and, implicitly, heterosexual—family unit.

Thankfully, the political homophobia of these Conservative years was swept away in a tide of red as the Labour government which was elected in 1997, 2001 and 2005 brought in a whole raft of changes to drastically improve the lives of LGBT people, including civil partnerships, discrimination legislation, adoption rights, equality in the age of consent, the repeal of Section 28 and the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which allowed trans people to change their legal gender.

The Coalition and Conservative governments which followed in the next three elections were far from perfect—as their treatment of LGBT asylum seekers attests—but they did introduce equal marriage, and Theresa May went against the majority of her party in her plans to reform the GRA.

However, I fear that yesterday’s election may turn out to be the worst for LGBT rights in nearly thirty years.

The Conservatives have the weakest manifesto policies on LGBT issues of the three major parties. Unlike the other two, they have no plans to reform the GRA to make the process of changing gender easier, to improve PSHE and sex education on LGBT issues or to make it easier for people with HIV to access the important PrEP drug.