Readers Discretion Advised
‘Out of touch’ is one of those phrases that seems to awkwardly linger around the Prime Minister; a phrase that has flagged itself in many Sunak-related headlines, but a phrase that has seemed apparently applicable once more.
The recent Conservative Party Conference in early October saw Rishi Sunak broadcast what activists are calling potentially ‘dangerous’ anti-trans ideology as he claimed the general public are being ‘bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be’, boldly concluding his point with the summative, ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.’
Organisers and activists at Birmingham Pride argue that his comments will put transgender lives ‘at risk’. Eva Echo, a trans campaigner, asserted that his speech had ‘really thrown a grenade out there at a time when hate crime is on the rise nationally’, recognising their loss of safety and protection. This fear comes as no shock as, while hate crime has had a general year on year fall, transgender related hate crimes have risen by 11% in the past year, with 4,732 transgender hate crimes recorded in the year ending in March 2023.
Interestingly, the Home Office attributes this rise in hate crimes to heavy discussion of the topic by politicians like Mr Sunak. So it begs the question of how far is it worth putting the lives of transgender people in jeopardy for the comfort of women and children, and whether this comfort is diminished much at all by trans-inclusionary spaces.
Mr Sunak cited the protection of his two daughters and wife as the main source of his ardent interest in trans politics. In April of this year he announced his open support of The Express Women’s Rights Campaign, which detailed five trans exclusionary demands for female only spaces. Essentially this booted transgender women from women’s sporting activities, bathrooms, changing rooms and prisons.
Reasoning his daughters, the PM ironically declared ‘I want them to grow up in a world where they are free to live their lives the way they wish […] where they can go about their daily lives safe and protected’. It’s unimaginable how he’ll achieve this considering those who identify as transgender make up fewer than 1% of the population. The negligible effect of the community on women has too been acknowledged by Lord Justice Holroyde, talking on women’s prison spaces, who claimed many numbers pulled about transgender offenders are ‘unsafe’ and a ‘misuse’ of undetailed, miniscule statistics. Could the PM, again out of touch, but this time with the statistics of his own argument, really have been led by an interest in women’s issues?
It seems that the authenticity of his strong compassion for vulnerable groups extending to radical feminist rights agreements may not be too likely, so is there perhaps ulterior motive to his denouncement of the trans community?
His phrasing was deliberately reductionist, which evokes the question of whether the sweeping of crucial contextual trans discourse under the rug, was a diversion to allow his supporters walk straight over more poignant issues. The PM is still faced with burning questions relating to the record high 7.68 million people still on NHS waiting lists, the 6% food price inflation and 13% energy inflation, as well as his scrapping of the Northern leg of HS2. In the mission of dodging vague and avoidant answers to these, Sunak’s certainty comes from trans erasure, which conservative MP Andrew Boff claims is not even coherent to what he sees as Tory beliefs.
Boff, who was ejected from Suella Braverman’s conference speech in which she rejected ‘gender ideology’, concurred that his party were weaponizing the trans community and ‘picking on vulnerable people’ for easy support. He told LBC the party was ‘using this culture war battle ground for no good effect’, and that it was ultimately ‘hurting people’. He and, as he claims, many other Conservatives agree the party needs to start focussing ‘on the important things’, which assumedly refers, in short, to the lengthy list above.
It is thus not outlandish to suggest Sunak ought to drag back out the real problems he’s chucked under the rug along with the ignored gender discourse, before the nation becomes buried in more financial crisis on top of a potentially deadly culture war on the transgender community.
