While speaking at the Conservative party conference (Wednesday 4 October), the crowd applauded Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, as he insisted that the British public are being “bullied” into believing “people can be any sex they want”, and claiming that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman”.

These comments follow Suella Braverman’s support of Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s plans to ban trans women from being treated in female hospital wards. In a Sky News interview, Braverman declared: “Trans women have no place in women’s wards or, indeed, any safe space relating to biological women.”

Despite just 0.1% of the population identifying as trans women, a significant portion of the Conservative Party Conference focused on this group. It seems the senseless attacking of an already vulnerable community is the government’s ‘hot take’ when it comes to the NHS. But what about the waiting lists that are over a year long? Or the poor working environments for NHS staff? And how about the statistic that gynaecology waiting lists have shot up 60% following Covid, which has resulted in women and non-binary folk waiting roughly 110 weeks for an initial gynaecology consultation? Crickets…

As a cisgender woman who has been impacted by government failures in ‘women’s health’, I can tell you loud and clear that trans women are not the problem here, nor will they ever be. The issue lies with a government that refuses to acknowledge the clear disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions affecting people assigned female at birth (AFAB), and, instead, continues to use the transgender community as a scapegoat for governmental failures.

Due to the crushing weight of the pandemic on the NHS, my treatment for endometriosis was delayed so much that I was put into medically induced menopause as a last-ditch effort to make the pain bearable. I was 20 years old. Where was Braverman’s concern for women’s safety then? What about the fact that endometriosis is as common as diabetes, estimated to affect one in 10 women and those assigned female of birth, yet still takes, on average, 7.5 years to diagnose? Do Sunak, Barclay and Braverman feel strongly enough about the 38,231 women waiting over a year for an initial consultation to attack their own failures as venomously as they have the trans community? I don’t think so.

In December 2022, trans advocacy group TransLucent published findings from an investigation, in which it submitted freedom of information requests to 102 NHS trusts, with the question: “How many natal female inpatients complained that a transgender woman inpatient was being cared for in the same ward?” Over the entirety of the investigation, not a single complaint was made. Not one person was affected by trans women receiving care in the same ward, because guess what? A person’s gender identity doesn’t affect anybody else!

Transphobia in the media is rife, and it’s having real-life consequences on real, innocent people. The normalisation and encouragement of transphobic rhetoric saw 16-year-old Brianna Ghey murdered in February of this year, and yet little has changed when it comes to changing the narrative and protecting trans lives. Stonewall’s 2018 report LGBT In Britain found that 46% of transgender people had thoughts about taking their own lives and 60% felt that life was not worth living.

For the prime minister to encourage such harmful attacks on the trans community via such an influential platform is beyond problematic, and will only further endanger trans lives. If Barclay’s proposed ban does go ahead, there is no telling just how far this systematic ostracisation of trans men and women will go, which is equally heart-wrenching and enraging.

This villainisation of LGBTQ+ communities through propaganda and fear-mongering media unfortunately is not a new concept. However, the parallels between media discourse on the gay community throughout the 1970s almost mirror the narrative being painted about the transgender community today, from accusations that education on gender identity is ‘indoctrinating children’ to ‘bathroom panic’ and notions that ‘it’s a phase; they’ll grow out of it’ or ‘it’s not natural’ – these distraction tactics are something we’ve seen before, yet people are still buying into it. 

Matt Bernstein has a great analogy on this on Instagram, stating: “A few decades ago, you would’ve thought the gay movement was a step too far… guess what? That’s the moment we’re in again, and you’re about to be on the wrong side of history”.

By endorsing transphobia, not only are lives being put at risk, but the British public is also allowing Sunak’s government to continue avoiding accountability for its failures. Research shows that no one – be that patient or doctor – has made any form of complaint about trans women on women’s wards, yet the health secretary wants to make trans women a target to take attention away from a collapsing NHS. Regardless of gender identity, almost all of us are a victim of governmental failures to adequately support the NHS. Be it waiting lists, the loss of a loved one, not being able to access a dentist, a GP or even get a blood test without a two-week wait. Prescriptions are delayed, diagnoses are being missed, and Tory members partied as Covid patients died alone. Is the public really willing to believe that gender identity in the NHS is the issue here?

The failure of LGBTQ+ Conservatives to address these attacks on the transgender community merely confirms that the Tories are happy to use a vulnerable community as a scapegoat to distract the public from its own failings. Who’s the real bully, Sunak? 

Images: Getty