British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserts stance on transgender identity | EUROtoday

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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserted his stance on gender identity in a speech Wednesday, stating it was “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” — a comment that sparked criticism from transgender rights activists and elicited fervent applause from attendees of the Conservative Party Conference.

After promising to legislate that “sexual and sadistic” killers would spend their lives in jail, Sunak listed different positions he stated “shouldn’t be controversial,” together with “for parents to know what their children are being taught in school about relationships.”

“Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women,” Sunak continued throughout his closing speech at his celebration’s annual gathering, held this yr in Manchester. “And we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman — that’s just common sense.”

In April, Sunak made headlines for agreeing with a conservative interviewer’s suggestion that every one girls — relatively than 99 % — “haven’t got a penis.”

He took a much less strident tone on the time, stating that “we should always have compassion and understanding and tolerance for those who are thinking about their gender,” however that “the issue of biological sex is fundamentally important” to girls’s rights and ladies’s areas.

School is a ‘nightmare’ for trans and nonbinary children. Here’s why.

In June, PinkNews, a British information outlet that covers the LGBTQ+ group, accused Sunak of mocking trans girls because it revealed what it stated was a secretly recorded video of the prime minister speaking throughout a gathering with conservative MPs.

In the video, a person presupposed to be Sunak is heard joking that Liberal Democrats celebration chief Ed Davey “has been very busy” attempting to “convince everybody that women clearly had penises.”

“You all know I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths at 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology,” the person within the video stated.

A spokesperson for the prime minister defended these feedback, saying it was “a joke aimed at a political opponent rather than a specific group.”

While gender identity is a hotly debated matter amongst politicians in Britain, a survey from Ipsos, revealed in June, discovered that almost all Britons assume transgender folks face discrimination. A 2022 survey of about 5,000 Britons from the assume tank More In Common additionally discovered that 46 % of respondents agreed with the assertion that “a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman.” Less than a 3rd stated they disagreed.

After Sunak’s speech Wednesday, India Willoughby, a outstanding transgender newsreader, accused the prime minister of “putting people in danger and inciting threats to their lives” in a video posted to the social media platform X, previously often known as Twitter.

“We now have a British government and a prime minister that has said that it doesn’t recognize trans people,” Willoughby stated. “If you don’t acknowledge a group of people exist, then obviously that group of people don’t have rights.”

More than 2,800 potential transgender hate crimes had been reported between September 2001 and February 2022, in line with knowledge from the Metropolitan Police Service in Greater London. The variety of reported incidents considerably elevated beginning within the mid-2010s, leaping from 75 incidents in 2013 to 428 in 2021.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/05/rishi-sunak-gender-identity-transgender/