Is The British Government Transphobic?

The speech delivered by Rishi Sunak today (04/10/23) at the Conservative party conference in Manchester was shockingly bad, even for the Tories.

‘We shouldn’t get bullied into thinking that people can be any sex they want to be. A man is a man and a woman is a woman and that’s just common sense’, Sunak said in one sentence.

‘The conservatives are the party that legislated for same-sex marriage. Love cascades down the generations’, he said in the next… 

Preaching love and hate in the same sentence… 

It’s just contradictory, 
hypocritical, 
completely messed up.

The only thing ‘cascading down the generations’ where the Tories are concerned is hate. They wouldn’t know what love is if it slapped them around the face…

And yes, this might all just be a ‘culture war’, a desperate attempt by the Tories to appeal to the far right of the party, but for people who are directly affected by this extremely bigoted talk (i.e., trans people), it feels like a war against them. Like a war against their right to be who they are. Like a war against their right to live, essentially…


Transgender women will be banned from being treated in female hospital wards in England, under new proposals suggested by the health secretary, Steve Barclay. Why? To ‘restore common sense in the NHS’, as backed by Home Secretary Suella Braverman…

‘Trans women have no place in women’s wards, or indeed in any safe space relating to biological women.’

Describing transgender women as ‘biological men’ is not least offensive, but also incredibly harmful. With transgender people already increasingly at risk of suffering from their mental ill health (nine in ten young trans adults in the UK have had suicidal thoughts), comments such as these put trans people at even greater risk of harming themselves…

Whilst only 0.5% of the UK population have a different gender identity to their assigned sex at birth (Census 2021), for those 0.5%, this speech may have just invalidated their whole identity.

‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman.’

What about all the people who are nonbinary, who don’t identify as fully male or fully female, but as somewhere in the middle, maybe, or people who don’t exist on the binary at all? For all of these people, their whole identity is completely dismissed by the Tories.

We might have the first Indian-origin Prime Minister, and one of the most diverse governments we’ve ever had in terms of ethnic diversity, but we also seemingly have one of the most bigoted.

Breaking the glass ceiling, then pulling up the ladder, welcome to Tory Britian.