Tory MP Dehenna Davison has openly opposed the rhetoric being used by the Party in regards to trans rights
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGE VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
After Suella Braverman’s comments about how being gay wasn’t enough of a reason to claim asylum last week, the Conservative Party continued to attack LGBTQIA rights in their recent Conservative Party Conference.
PM Rishi Sunak has been met with backlash after his statement that “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that ‘people can be any sex they want to be’. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”
Home Secretary Suella Braverman also doubled down on her comments made last week about queer refugees in a speech she made about reducing immigration.
Dehenna Davison, who is an openly bisexual Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, has said that she disagrees with this rhetoric. “It’s disgusting. It is absolutely disgusting,” she said. “There’s no other way to put it. I’d say that to their faces if we were discussing it in person. The entire LGBT community has faced a really difficult history and so much adversity.”
She continued: “We’ve still got a long way to go. I was quite devastated to see the recent polling come out that shows that the public’s kind of attitude towards the trans community is going backwards. I think one of the problems there is that these debates around single-sex spaces about trans participation in sport get so inflamed by both sides.”
Heath Secretary Steve Barclay has also contributed to the increasing anti-trans rhetoric occurring in the Conservative Party this week with proposals to ban trans women from entering female-only wards of hospitals.
Leni Morris, CEO of Galop, the UK’s LGBTQIA anti-abuse charity, believes this sort of rhetoric is extremely dangerous. She said: “Over the last few days, members of the Conservative Party have used their platform at their Party Conference to undermine the rights, safety, and dignity of trans people in the UK. Nothing that has been said constitutes a change in any statutory guidance or national legislation, but it does add to the ongoing negative rhetoric in public life around trans people.”
“We already hear from trans victims of abuse that their perpetrators, whether at home or in the street, are using what is being said by politicians and in the media as tools of that abuse against them,” Leni continued. “Perpetrators are using the sense that public life is becoming less welcoming of, and less safe for, trans people in the UK to further control and manipulate their trans victims.”
Labour MP Nadia Whittome summed up the Conservative Party aptly on Twitter, writing: “The far right called – they want their ideas back.”
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