Analysis: UK dispute is turning into transphobic spectacle

The dispute over the leadership of the Conversation Party of the UK will result in the choice of the country’s next prime minister. In addition to the standard promises of tax cuts or a lean state, there was also an enthusiastic promotion of positions anti-trans potentially marking an intensification of the current government’s “war”.

Leading the group of hopefuls is Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose resignation from the government last week contributed to the Resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson .

After the second round of voting among Conservative Party lawmakers earlier this month, Sunak topped the list of five candidates remaining in the race.

One of Sunak’s first political pledges, after he announced his intention to run, was to protect “women’s rights,” linking to an article in which an unnamed ally of the politician was quoted as saying the lawmaker was “critical of women.” recent trends to erase women through the use of clumsy and gender-neutral language.”

Sunak will create a manifesto, this ally told the British tabloid Daily Mail, where he will oppose women. trans who compete in women’s sport and “will ask schools to be more careful about how they teach sex and gender issues.”

The government led by Johnson has leaned toward culture warfare issues during the pandemic, as it tried to play its traditional base of the Southern Conservative Party and new Northern England voters won over from the opposition and centre-left Labor Party in elections. of 2019.

Even as polls suggest that culture war issues such as trans rights do not concern the British public on a daily basis, many of the candidates have taken up the mantle of government, staking their positions on the debate over sex and gender identity.

In the past week, Conservative candidates are more likely to have been asked “what is a woman” by British journalists than to have been asked more traditional questions, such as the cost of a liter of milk.

On Wednesday, Sunak’s biggest rival in the race, the once relatively little-known secretary Penny Mordaunt, was asked if she would stick with culture war issues like trans rights.

“Let me deal with the issue floating in the background. He was [a ex-primeira-ministra do Reino Unido] Margaret Thatcher who said ‘every prime minister needs a penis [willie, em inglês]”,” Mordaunt said in reference to Thatcher’s deputy, William “Willie” Whitelaw. “A woman like me doesn’t have one,” he added.

Mordaunt spent a lot of time this week mulling over his earlier pro-trans views. She told the Pink News online in 2018, for example, that “trans women are women.”

In a Twitter post on July 10, Mordaunt backtracked, stressing that trans women can be legally female by law, but “that doesn’t mean they’re biological women, like me.”

She added: “I am biologically a woman. If I have a hysterectomy or mastectomy, I’m still a woman. And I am legally a woman.”

Terms like “biological woman” are considered insulting by trans advocates when they are used by critical gender activists, who believe that the sex assigned at birth is immutable, and any rights or privileges associated with it cannot be extended to those who choose to identify as this genre.

The repeated misconception about the gender of trans people in the public sphere is not only detrimental to their well-being. To suggest that gender does not exist and that a person is the sum total of their reproductive organs is reductive, erasing the existence of trans and non-binary people, advocates say.

However, these gender-critical views, echoed by a broadly sympathetic British press, have helped constrain efforts to expand trans rights, activists say.

This includes trans people potentially being left out of plans to ban conversion therapy, and the conservative-led government scrapping efforts to make it easier for trans people to change their gender marker without medical requirements.

“Not even in my adult life can I remember a situation where, in an election or leadership selection process, there was this focus on LGBTQIA+ rights measures,” said Nancy Kelley, chief executive of the rights group. LGBTQIA+ stonewall, at CNN .

The British public is more tolerant than some politicians or the press would like to acknowledge, she said. “I think it’s part of a broader phenomenon that we’re experiencing in the UK where we have really progressive and positive public attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bi and trans people, but we have a lot of media and political conversations talking obsessively about trans people, and largely in a negative way,” Kelley said.

“Disproportionate and scary”

A study by the think tank More in Common, published in June, found that “few Brits spend a lot of time thinking about gender identity issues.”

He added that in focus group conversations “most Britons, even those opposed to trans people using single-sex spaces, look for common sense ways to deal with issues around changing rooms and bathrooms that involve being aware of people and treat each other with respect.”

Nearly all the focus group participants “asked why there were no more unisex bathroom options available, which seemed to many a practical solution to the single-sex space issue,” he wrote.

What is dominating public discourse is the state of the economy of the UK where the Inflation reached 9.1% in May the highest in 40 years and the highest among the major G7 economies – and is expected to rise above 11% later this year despite a series of rate hikes.

The country is in the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, forcing families to choose between eating or keeping warm this winter amid real stagnation in wages for more than a decade, economists say.

“We have a major cost of living crisis, we are facing a global climate emergency, there is the war in Ukraine… dealing with the aftermath of Brexit – the fact that the media is talking so obsessively about trans issues, and everyone is expected candidates speak their opinions about the place of trans people in society, it’s so disproportionate and scary,” for a group that represents just 0.6% of the population, Kelley said.

Transphobia may not be an electorally viable strategy, but that hasn’t stopped the hopes of this year’s candidates.

Foreign Minister Liz Truss, who came third in the second round of voting, has voiced her opposition to making it easier for transgender people to change their gender markers in England and Wales. While she avoided the culture wars issues in her campaign launch speech on Thursday, her allies spoke about Mordaunt’s pro-trans record.

Behind Truss is former Equality Secretary Kemi Badenoch, a spirited advocate of culture wars who warned in 2020 that teaching “critical racial theory as fact” would be against the law.

There is no evidence, however, that schools have done this. Vice News reported this week that Badenoch has asked the country’s financial services regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to drop its policy of trans inclusion.

Badenoch’s spokesman did not deny the allegation, telling CNN in a statement that “in response to an inquiry from the FCA, and in her capacity as Equality Secretary, Kemi wrote to the FCA about how they could enforce the Equality Act and improve the representation of women on city boards.”

At the conservative Policy Exchange think tank, where Badenoch launched his leadership campaign on Tuesday, journalists noticed handwritten signs scrawled in black ink with the words “men” and “ladies” pasted on the doors of gender-neutral restrooms.