Keir Starmer and the Great Trans Flip-Flop
How politicians lie and betray trans people
Trans people are never far from discussion if we’re talking about British politics. For the last several years, are discussing trans people because they’ve run out of anything else to talk about. Of course, there are issues that should be considered rather more pressing, but this seems to not matter at all.
You’d hope that in this time, Labour, a party that styles itself as being progressive, would be making the case for trans inclusion and taking the fight to reactionaries on this issue, and you would be right, sort of.
For a while, Labour were supportive of and (for a time) Keir Starmer. Starmer actually for a long time said he was a supporter of and getting rid of the outdated gender recognition forms we have in place currently.
Now, it is quite a different story, and he has moved firmly to the right on this issue. He just recently came out in favour of the recent that trans women are not considered women under the Equality Act. Even before this, he had clearly moved to a much more transphobic place despite claiming to treat trans people with dignity and respect.
I bring this up because, for one thing, it’s important to hold leaders to account and also, because I find Starmer’s constant flip-flopping to be rather worrying and indicative of who he is as a man and a politician.
You see, at the time of the 2020 Labour leadership election, there was still a hunger for progressive politics from the party despite their defeat at the 2019 election. Many of the candidates such as Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner spoke in favour ofwould have seen Labour expel anti-trans members.
It is here that we start to see who Starmer is through the cracks, as he was actually not in favour of this policy. Now, at the time this might not have been so much of an issue as he was vocally supportive of trans people and self-id as stated but looking back now, I do think it makes everything that has since transpired somewhat interesting.
He understood that he could never come out with his current platform on trans people because he knew the progressive base of the Labour Party in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn stepping down would never elect him. As a result, he pretended to support trans people when it was politically expedient, but dropped that support when he no longer needed to pretend.
When the Tories struck down Nicola Sturgeon’s attempts to reform the gender recognition process in Scotland, Starmer came out in support of the Tories, and he has been moving further to the right on trans people ever since. In many cases, he has actually been making the same points almost word for word as Rishi Sunak, who was an obviously .
Just recently, Starmer even had the gall to mention Brianna Ghey, a trans girl who was killed by two teenagers, in parliament despite his obvious transphobia, in a move that criticised him for.
Again, he has spoken in favour of the recent Supreme Court ruling and even before this, talking points about what a woman is. Yet for some reason, he still tries to paint himself as being progressive in this regard. In the lead up to the 2024 election, he criticised Rishi Sunak for his constant transphobia and said he would treat trans . As we have seen, he has done anything but.
Under his policy, Brianna Ghey would still have to be buried as and considered a male, which doesn’t sound very respectful to me.
The really sad part about this is that there is more opposition to transphobia from within the Tory party than there is from Starmer. against transphobia from the conservatives in Parliament last year. To her credit, she was obviously very angered by the idea of “removing the T” from LGBT, and you could see that this was something she was very passionate about.
the former conservative Prime Minister, has consistently been supportive of trans people for years and even tried to push for self-id all the way back in 2017. It’s a really sad state of affairs when Conservative MPS are more progressive on the issue of trans rights than a Labour Prime Minister.
Looking back, I think it’s clear from the get-go that Starmer was never going to be truly supportive of trans people. If you listen to what he said when he claimed to support self-id or even listen to what he says about trans people now, there’s no passion behind anything he says and when you look into his eyes, they’re completely bottomless and empty.
Keir Starmer truly does not believe in anything, and I don’t think that he even has any real interest in politics. In my opinion, he sees it purely as a means of advancing his own career and a means of climbing up the social ladder. That’s why he claimed to support trans people in the past, but no longer does. He only expresses opinions when they are politically expedient to him.
