I note that your 2024 manifesto includes the following:
“We will also modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process. We will remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance; whilst retaining the need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a specialist doctor, enabling access to the healthcare pathway.
Labour is proud of our Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women; we will continue to support the implementation of its single-sex exceptions.”
However, you do not seem to have done any of this, and have in fact greatly intensified indignities for trans people by re-appointing notorious anti-trans activist Baroness Falkner as head of the EHRC, despite her views (in line with those of the Tories who appointed her) evidently being opposed to equality and human rights); and by amplifying anti-trans rhetoric, recanting your previously professed belief that trans women are women, and allowing your Minister for Equality to stand up and declare that trans women should not use women’s toilets – a stunningly regressive measure for which the UK issued a travel advisory just a few years ago.
Seema Malhotra commented in yesterday’s otherwise positive debate that “it is important to say that the Government are committed to ensuring that trans people receive the healthcare and support they need when accessing NHS services.”
However, in point of fact you have maintained a ban on puberty blockers, supposedly justified by the Cass Report – which recommended no such thing, despite its obvious bias and bizarrely shabby methodology (see e.g. Noone et al 2025).
Meanwhile, rather than supporting the Equality Act and “the implementation of its single-sex exceptions”, your government has supported interim guidance from the compromised EHRC that would obviate the need for any such exceptions, by blatantly disregarding what the Act requires by way of preventing discrimination, as well as the UK’s obligations under the ECHR.
I am unclear why you have decided to make your government the enemy of trans people and anyone who doesn’t conform with mainstream standards of gender presentation, but it will win you few friends among committed bigots, for whom Labour will never be quite bigoted enough; it will lose you many friends among those who believe in the things that the Labour Party is supposed to stand for, including many whose rights and dignity are threatened by the moral panic you are participating in; many who care about those who you threaten; and many who fear they could be next.
I come from a Labour family, but on the party’s current trajectory, I will be campaigning strongly for your replacement. My grandfather and great grandfather must be turning in their graves.
Yours sincerely,
Fergus Murray.
Sent on 2025-05-20. Most links added later.
I do not expect a reply, but will share it here if I receive one.
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