Reader’s opinion: ‘Southampton’s MPs are still failing the LGBT+ community’

By Andrew Godfrey-Collins.

Ahead of last year’s Pride, I wrote for In Common about the current Labour government’s frankly abysmal LGBT+ record. Under then Prime Minister Keir Starmer, it had become the first government since Margaret Thatcher’s to roll back progress for LGBT+ people. Specifically, it was in the process of stripping away trans people’s rights to healthcare access, inclusive education and legal recognition of their gender. In that article, I called on Southampton’s two Labour MPs, Satvir Kaur and Darren Paffey, to pick a side:  will you follow your principles and stand with the LGBT+ community? Or are you going to choose party loyalty over what you know is right?

So where are we now, one year on? We have a new prime minister, of course. But Andy Burnham pledged on the campaign trail to maintain his party’s current trajectory on trans rights and reappointed Bridget Phillipson, the architect of Labour’s Section 28 for trans people, as Minister for Equalities. The odious Wes Streeting is no longer Health Secretary, but his immediate replacement, James Murray, likewise denied that trans women are women and the current Health Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has pledged to bring in rules banning trans people from single-sex wards. 

In the month since Burnham took office, the new, widely criticised EHRC Code of Practice has come into force. We are now in a preposterous situation where a trans man could get married and be legally recognised as a man on the marriage certificate, yet be required to use the women’s toilets at the registry office after the ceremony. Or, worse, not be allowed to use either the men’s or women’s but instead forced to use the disabled toilets, which (in case the name doesn’t give it away) are supposed to be for disabled people. A trans woman who has a vaginoplasty could now be placed on a men’s ward while she recovers from the surgery. Women’s services and organisations that explicitly want to be able to support trans women who have suffered sexual or domestic violence are no longer permitted to do so under the Code. In her own recent letter in In Common Southampton’s first trans councillor, Misty Burgess, wrote that the mood in her community following the adoption of the Code ‘can only be  described as one of dread and distress’.

Meanwhile, from September the new Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance will segregate trans schoolchildren, even those who have already transitioned, from toilets and single-sex activities, and allow schools to reject ‘requests for social transition’ (a teacher I know personally informs me that at his school staff are specifically forbidden from respecting children’s requests to use a different name or pronouns). In terms of healthcare, it is now virtually impossible for young trans people to access not just puberty blockers but also hormones, while trans adults face waiting lists of many years, in some areas up to a decade, before their first appointment at a gender identity clinic. They also increasingly risk having hormone treatment denied or abruptly stopped by GPs.

The list could go on. Over on Bluesky, I have in fact been maintaining a list of how things have gotten worse for trans people under this government. It now extends to eight different graphics across two posts, because I could no longer fit everything into a single post using a legible font.

And what about our own Labour MPs here in Southampton, Darren and Satvir? In the year since my previous article, did they choose to stand with the LGBT+ community? Or have they essentially done and said nothing even as their own government savagely attacks trans people on multiple fronts? The title of this article may give my view on the matter away …

A year ago, I was quite charitable to them both. I acknowledged that they had met with trans constituents and said some reassuring things that suggested they did understand the concerns and would not support their government’s anti-trans agenda.

I am now far less inclined to be charitable. Neither of them deigned to reply to the questions I asked them in my previous article. When I directly presented Darren with a long list of his government’s anti-LGBT+ actions under a Facebook post in which he expressed his support for ‘our amazing LGBTQ+ community’,  he called it ‘ludicrous and exaggerated hyperbole’ and refused to respond. (He did not elaborate on which of the claims he considers hyperbolic.)

My own MP, Satvir, either ignores emails about her government’s anti-trans policies or sends boilerplate answers repeating the government’s justifications for those policies.

The gulf between both MPs’ professions of support for LGBT+ people and their actual actions became especially clear when the draft version of the EHRC Code was published. Almost 170 MPs signed Early Day Motion 240 calling on the Code not to be approved, because of the harm it would cause trans people and the confusions and inconsistencies the guidance would create. They included 93 Labour MPs and eight of the eleven members of the Women and Equalities Committee, including its chair Sarah Owen. Yet Darren and Satvir were not among them. Satvir’s excuse for not signing is that, as a member of the government, she cannot sign early day motions (though of course if she actually cared about LGBT+ people she could, you know, try not being part of the most anti-LGBT+ government since Thatcher). But Darren has no such excuse, and simply refused to oppose the Code.

An acquaintance recently told me that when they contacted their Conservative MP with a long list of concerns about the EHRC Code, he replied within less than two minutes to say simply: ‘I disagree’. You’d expect nothing less of a Tory. But at least he was honest. Whereas Satvir, Darren and many of their other colleagues seem to have perfected the art of giving the impression they support LGBT+ people without actually doing much if anything to support them. You could create a bingo card of some of the lines they wheel out time and again. Here are a few of them.

1 ‘The law’s the law’

So said Yvette Cooper recently in defence of segregating hospital services based on ‘biological sex’. All these self-avowed LGBT+ allies in parliament would love to support trans inclusion but, gosh darn it, the Supreme Court has spoken, and their hands are tied. The EHRC Code is simply setting out guidance for providers based on the law as it currently exists.

Of course, you can question whether the Code does actually get the law right. Remember, the Code is based on an interpretation of the law by the EHRC – a body whose chair, Mary-Ann Stephenson, was appointed by the government despite (or, dare I say, maybe precisely because of?) her reportedly gender-critical views, overruling the public recommendation of both the Human Rights and Women and Equalities committees. It’s a familiar ruse: a government appoints an ‘independent’ candidate to a committee who it knows will deliver exactly the result it wants, then denies any responsibility for that outcome and says they will have to defer to what the experts say. 

But even if you accept that the Code does accurately reflect the law: well, MPs can change the law. That’s kind of their whole deal. If MPs are deciding not to make legislative changes to protect trans people and restore their lost rights, either because they’re happy with the current situation or they’re unwilling to spend political capital on standing up for LGBT+ rights, that’s a choice they’ve made. What they don’t then get to do is have their cake and eat it: if you have made the choice not to support the LGBT+ community, you cannot rock up at Pride pretending that you do.

2 ‘We’re listening to trans people’

This is one that Darren in particular loves to say in response to criticism. He even uses it in the screenshot above. He and Satvir go to great pains to make sure we know they’re listening to what their trans constituents are saying. And I can only assume they make sympathetic noises and pull sympathetic faces as they are told about all the awful things this government is doing to trans people. Last year, they both sat down with local trans groups for a discussion so they could listen to their concerns. And got a great photo op for social media at the same time.

Which is all very well and good, except that – once again – they seem to be forgetting that they are MPs. If queer people merely wanted to be listened to, they could call the LGBT+ Switchboard. When they speak to MPs, they want them to actually do something. I am all too familiar from my own time in Labour with the politician’s trick of fobbing you off by giving the strong impression they are sympathetic to what you’re saying – only for you to realise afterwards they haven’t committed to doing anything at all. 

Satvir, Darren and their colleagues need to not just put on a show of sympathy and listening, but to actually speak up for trans people’s right to be recognised and respected in their genders.

3 ‘I’ve raised concerns’

Ah, but sometimes Darren and Satvir will go further and acknowledge that they do have ‘concerns’ about the government’s trans policies. Satvir pledged to ‘continue to raise concerns with the relevant ministers regarding the implementation of recent guidance published by the EHRC’, and Darren said he ‘shared concerns’ that trans constituents had brought up and ‘will be speaking to ministers’.

Curiously, they never seem to spell out what exactly they think those concerns are. Nor what form exactly ‘raising them’ took: did they simply forward a constituent’s email to the minister and leave it at that? Did they directly challenge a minister about those concerns – and if so did they get some sort of reassurance they considered satisfactory? Because, notably, the guidance they supposedly had ‘concerns’ about was approved unamended. So if those concerns we are assured that they raised have not in fact been addressed, what’s the next step we can expect from our MPs? Or is it simply a case of ‘We tried, we failed, now let’s move on’? Perhaps they should get that printed on a rainbow flag in time for Southampton Pride.

4 ‘Labour will always stand with the LGBT+ community’

Then there’s the utterly tone-deaf approach I’ve seen many Labour MPs take: post a message of (enthusiastic but short-on-details) support for the LGBT+ community on social media, with precisely zero acknowledgement that their party has actively made things worse for trans people since day 1 of coming into government. And then ignore all the trans people and allies in the comments pointing that fact out. If they want to be extra tone-deaf, they could even vaguely allude to how LGBT+ rights are under attack (a real ‘the phone call is coming from inside the building’ moment) or concede that there is still ‘more to do’ for LGBT+ equality – as if their government were tootling slowly but surely in the right direction rather than itself being part of the problem. To be maximally enraging, MPs could post a list of all the government’s positive ‘achievements’ for LGBT+ people (including a few that haven’t happened yet but will do soon, honest) that conspicuously leaves out all the many, many things it’s done or allowed to happen to strip trans people of their rights and dignity.

Sometimes, these posts are so brazenly detached from reality it cannot be called anything but gaslighting. MPs might claim that the government is ‘advancing the rights and protections afforded to trans people’ and ‘improving access to appropriate and high-quality healthcare’ even as it does the precise opposite. 

These posts are not going to fool queer people, but that’s not the point. Labour has given up on trying to win over LGBT+ voters; these kinds of posts are actually aimed at straight, cisgender people who like to think of themselves as allies but don’t pay much attention and will (or so Labour MPs hope) be satisfied by these kinds of utterly hollow statements.

5 ‘We want to treat trans people with dignity and respect’

An alternative tack Darren, Satvir et al. take is to simply slap on words like ‘dignity’, ‘respect’ or ‘compassion’ at the end of whatever they’re saying to magically cancel out any of the problems with the policies that they’re either explicitly or tacitly endorsing (or at least manifestly failing to oppose). In one of her rare responses to my emails, Satvir wrote that ‘I absolutely agree that trans people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect’, while in a public comment about the EHRC Code Darren wrote that ‘organisations will need to balance privacy, dignity, and access to essential services in a way that is lawful and humane’ and stressed ‘the need to ensure [the guidance] is not misused in a way that leads to exclusion, humiliation, or poor treatment of trans people’.

This reminds me of what happens when ‘progressive’ parties that take over from conservative administrations continue to incarcerate children in cages at the borders, or to subject disabled people to demeaning barriers to access the support they need to live, except they now adopt a rhetoric that implies they’re doing all these things in a way that is somehow gentler, more reasonable, more in line with human rights – even though the policies remain as cruel and damaging as ever.

MPs like Satvir and Darren may say they wish for trans people to be treated in a respectful and humane way, yet by failing to oppose the EHRC Code they support them being treated in disrespectful and dehumanising ways: forced into segregated spaces, subjected to judgements about their appearance, denied their identities. You cannot claim disrespectful treatment is respectful and make it so. Just as you cannot insist that transphobic policies must not be allowed to lead to ‘exclusion, humiliation, or poor treatment’ and make it so.

It is rather telling that Darren speaks of the risk of the EHRC guidance being ‘misused’ and insists that should not happen. As if there is a way of implementing it properly that would be consistent with support for trans people’s rights and dignity. But even if the guidance is implemented precisely as intended, trans people would not be allowed to use spaces and services in line with their gender. Compassionate segregation is still segregation. 

No pride in gaslighting

This article has, as you may have noticed, been extremely negative up to this point. I would like to wrap up with a few positive suggestions for the kind of behaviour I’d like to see from our MPs here in Southampton (and from others around the country).

First, apologise. Say ‘We’re sorry our government has let LGBT+ people down. We’re going to do better in future.’ Rather than denying all wrongdoing and petulantly feigning bafflement at why there is so much anger against your government from our community. 

Second, make specific commitments to support certain policies (such as legislative change to restore gender recognition and inclusion) and oppose others (such as healthcare bans). Ditch the vague, generic statements of support.

Third, use your public platforms to vocally oppose the hostility being directed against our community – including where it comes from your own party.

And if you’re not going to do anything of those things, then do at least have the common decency not to show your faces at Pride this weekend.

Andrew is a Southampton-based campaigner for LGBT+ rights and climate action. In his professional life, he works as a translator, editor and language consultant. Pronouns: he/him.

• Image shows last year’s transgender solidarity march in Southampton.