How UK’s race for prime minister is marred by transphobia
As the UK Conservative Party looks to elect a leader to replace the beleaguered Boris Johnson, the culture war issue of transphobia has come to the front and centre of the race.
So much so that television bosses were on Monday forced to scrap a planned debate between contenders for the leadership of Britain’s Conservative party after MPs voted again to narrow down the field.
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The five remaining candidates — Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat — had been due to appear in the third televised debate on Tuesday night.
But former finance minister Sunak and Foreign Secretary Truss pulled out, Sky News, which was due to host the programme, said.
“Conservative MPs are said to be concerned about the damage the debates are doing to the image of the Conservative party, exposing disagreements and splits within the party,” Sky added in a statement.
Let’s take a look at what’s happening:
Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch — who topped the second round of voting among Conservative MPs — have all staked out anti-trans positions to appeal to the narrow constituency of Conservative Party members who tend to be whiter, older and more right-wing than the general public.
The candidates face a series of votes from lawmakers this week, who will narrow down the field to two, before facing a runoff among an estimated 180,000 Conservative Party members.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came in first, took to Twitter to pledge that he would protect ‘women’s rights’. Which sounds fair enough.
Excerpt for the post linking to a piece quoting an unnamed Sunak ally as saying that Sunak was “critical of recent trends to erase women via the use of clumsy, gender-neutral language.”
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The ally said Sunak would create a manifesto that would oppose trans women competing in women’s sport and “will call on schools to be more careful in how they teach on issues of sex and gender.” “We must be able to call a mother a mother and talk about breastfeeding,” the ally said, as per Daily Mail.
“He believes we must be able to call a mother a mother and talk about breastfeeding, alongside trans-inclusive language where needed,” the ally added.
“Under his leadership, sex education will be sensitive and age-appropriate, so we enable children to have a childhood. He also recognises that women are still shouldering a disproportionate burden of family life, so will look again at child care and make sure public services are family-friendly,” the ally was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Meanwhile, trade minister Penny Mordaunt, who came in second in the voting behind Sunak, and who last week became a surprise frontrunner and favourite of bookmakers, on Wednesday had this to say about the culture war issues of trans rights: “Let me deal with the issue floating around in the background. It was (former UK Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher who said that ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie,'” Mordaunt said in reference to Thatcher’s deputy, William “Willie” Whitelaw.
“A woman like me doesn’t have one,” she was quoted as saying by CNN.
The little-known Mordaunt was also forced to challenge accusations that she had pushed through a policy to end the requirement for trans people to obtain a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before they could legally change gender when she was equalities minister in Theresa May’s government.
Mordaunt told the BBC’s Sunday Morning program that she had managed a consultation with health care professionals but no policy had been developed while she was in the job.
That marks quite a turnaround for Mourdant, who in March said in the House of Commons: “Trans men are men and trans women are women.” Mourdant in 2018 told Pink News “trans women are women.” Mourdant in a long Twitter thread last Sunday decried an attempt by some to paint her as ‘woke’ and claimed ‘challenged the trans orthodoxy with real and genuine concern’.
As per Pink News, Mourdant was responding to a piece in the Daily Mail from lobbying group Conservatives for Women which called her a “committed warrior for the trans lobby”.
While Kemi Badenoch remains little known, she has seen her star rise after her public showing in a television debate Friday, and led a poll of party members by the ConservativeHome website on Sunday.
Badenoch, whose parents are from Nigeria, would be the first Black prime minister and, at 42, the youngest in more than 250 years.
Badenoch has attacked Mordaunt for her stance on transgender rights, a rallying call in the “culture wars” that is exercising the Tory right.
As per CNN, Badenoch is a spirited culture wars proponent who in 2020 warned that teaching “critical race theory as fact” would be against the law – that despite no evidence schools were doing so.
Vice News reported this week that Badenoch urged the country’s financial services regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to drop its policy on trans inclusion.
Badenoch’s spokesperson did not deny the allegation, telling CNN, “In response to a FCA consultation, and in her capacity as Equalities Minister, Kemi wrote to the FCA on how they could comply with the Equality Act and improve the representation of women on city boards.”
On Tuesday, when Badenoch launched her leadership campaign, journalists noted handwritten signs scrawled in black ink with the words “men” and “ladies” taped to the doors of gender-neutral toilets, as per CNN.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss in her role as Minister for Women and Equalities, has steadfastly refused to include trans people in the ban on conversion therapy, as per The Tribune.
Truss, who came in third, has been vocal in her opposition to making it easier for trans people to change their gender markers in England and Wales, CNN reported.
Tammy Hyman, writing in The Tribune, warned that the Conservative Party leadership race was becoming a “war on trans people”.
“These hostile attitudes towards trans people and gender non-conformity are frequently disguised under the rubric of defending women’s ‘sex-based rights’,” Hyman wrote.
“Considering the narrative spun, you’d be forgiven for thinking that trans people dominated our media, sporting institutions, and educational establishments. The truth is that trans people continue to face extreme social marginalisation, particularly at work, with a 2018 survey indicating one in three UK employers would be unwilling to hire a transgender individual,” Hyman wrote.
“In reality, the Tories’ latest iteration of ‘authoritarian populism’ is simply an attempt to pin the blame on trans people for the failures of successive Conservative administrations, which have overseen skyrocketing inequality and the largest fall in living standards on record. Whether it is trade unionists, migrants, or trans people, the Conservatives are desperate to locate an ‘enemy within’ who is really at fault for how bad things currently are.”
Aghast, say activists
“Not in my adult lifetime can I remember a situation where in a leadership election or selection process, there’s been this amount of focus on LGBTQ+ rights measures,” Nancy Kelley, chief executive of LGBTQ rights group Stonewall, told CNN.
Kelly though said the British public is more tolerant than some politicians or the press care to acknowledge. “I think it’s part of a wider phenomenon that we’re experiencing in the UK where we have really progressive, positive public attitudes to lesbian, gay, bi and trans people, but we’ve got plenty of media and political conversation quite obsessively talking about trans people, and largely in a negative way,” Kelley said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on 7 July he was quitting as Conservative leader after a government rebellion in protest at his scandal-hit administration.
He is staying on as prime minister until his successor is announced on 5 September.
In the two previous televised debates — on Channel 4 on Friday and the ITV network on Sunday — the contenders clashed notably on whether to cut taxes to help ease a soaring cost of living crisis.
But Sunday’s clash turned more acrimonious — and personal — with candidates encouraged to directly criticise one another and their proposals.
Sunak called out Truss for voting against Brexit, her previous membership of the Liberal Democrats, and her position on tax.
In turn, Truss questioned Sunak’s stewardship of the economy.
Paul Goodman, from the ConservativeHome website, likened the debates to a “political version of ‘The Hunger Games'” and questioned why they agreed to it.
“Tory MPs and activists will have watched in horror as several of the candidates flung buckets of manure over each other,” he wrote.
He questioned why they would publicly accept to criticise the record of the government that all but one of them served in or the policies they supported as ministers.
The main Opposition Labour party has called for Johnson to leave immediately.
Its leader, Keir Starmer, called the candidates’ withdrawal was a sign of a party that was “out of ideas (and) out of purpose”.
“Pulling out of a TV debate when you want to be prime minister doesn’t show very much confidence,” he added.
With inputs from agencies
