British Labour's willingness to throw trans people under the bus shows how mainstream 'gender-critical' views have become in the party
Keir Starmer's new government is legitimising anti-trans talking points, research and conspiracies - such as the increasingly popular "desistance" myth
It’s been a long time coming. After 14 years, the Conservative Party resoundingly lost their grip on power in the United Kingdom, as the British public delivered a landslide victory for the Labour Party. The results of the July 4 election mean Sir Keir Starmer is now the UK prime minister and has a commanding majority of more than 170 seats.
On the face of it, this should be good news for LGBTQ+ people. The Labour Party considers itself “the party of equality” thanks to its legacy of playing a pioneering role in passing progressive LGBTQ+ legislation. Not to mention, the fact that this Parliament has the most number of openly LGB MPs in British history. Though obviously there are no trans MPs.
However, in the lead-up to the election, Starmer said in an interview with The Times of London that trans women do not have the right to use women-only spaces, even if they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC). For those readers who don’t live on TERF island (lucky you), a GRC is needed for adult trans people to change their birth certificate and their sex marker with the state. Not only are Starmer’s comments shameful and wrong about the law (ironic given he is a human rights lawyer), they are also a significant backtracking on his previous support for trans rights and self-ID.
What’s even more alarming is that Starmer’s seeming change of heart follows in the footsteps of numerous senior Labour politicians who have started espousing gender-critical talking points. Most notably, Wes Streeting, the now health secretary responsible for the National Health Service. Over the last year, Streeting (a gay man), has said he regrets saying that “trans women are women”, expressed sympathy for JK Rowling and called for trans women to be banned from women-only wards in hospitals.
The Labour Party’s willingness to throw trans people under the bus underscores just how mainstream gender-critical views have become in the party, which has many in the community feeling wary about what might happen over the next five years.
What’s especially concerning is the ways in which this now makes Keir Starmer’s government susceptible to legitimising anti-trans talking points, research and conspiracies. One such example is the desistance myth that has slowly been gaining renewed traction in the British press as a fresh prong in the attack on gender-affirming care.
What is the desistance myth and why does British media keep pushing it?
Over the last year, the British media establishment has been quietly planting a pernicious seed about young people experiencing gender dysphoria in the minds of the general public.
The insidious idea being trotted out by the likes of The Observer (sister paper to The Guardian), The Telegraph, and The Times of London (among others) is that: “gender distress can come and go until the early 20s and in most young people resolves itself, so may be but is usually not, a sign a child would go to develop an adult trans identity.”
So basically, what they are suggesting is that there is “scientific evidence that shows gender dysphoria in young people is simply a phase most will eventually grow out of.
As absurd as that might sound, this notion has gained credibility thanks to the roundly criticised NHS England’s review into the provision of paediatric gender-affirming care (also known as the Cass Review). Throughout The Cass Review there is wording and mentions of research that reiterates “in the vast majority [of young people] gender incongruence is resolved by puberty”. Wes Streeting endorsed the review, saying a “Labour government will work to implement the expert recommendations of the Cass review”.
The dangerous and worrying implication of the mainstreaming of this idea by the media and political establishment is that it legitimises questions about whether any kind of care at all should be given to young people experiencing gender dysphoria.
To help get to the bottom of where this idea came from and how to challenge it, we spoke to Dr. Jack Turban, director of the UCSF Gender Psychiatry Program and author of Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity.
“People often misrepresent old research of kids who were referred to gender clinics, in which many grew up to be cisgender and gay,” Dr. Turban tells me over email. “What they fail to recognise is that many of these kids were actually cisgender tomboys or cisgender boys with ‘feminine interests.’ This is very different from being transgender.”
The “old research” Dr. Turban is referring to is a series of now widely criticised papers from 2008 to 2013 which “found” that roughly 80% of young people experiencing gender dysphoria would essentially grow out of it as they grew older. As Brynn Tannehill wrote in 2016, this set of research is based on “bad statistics, bad science, homophobia and transphobia.”
Why? Well as Dr. Turban points out, many of these studies didn’t differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent gender dysphoria and those who rebelled against the gender norms expected of them based on the sex they were assigned at birth. Not to mention, one of the studies couldn’t reach nearly half of the children originally studied for follow up so egregious decided to treat all of them as people who had “desisted”.
There were also many critiques levelled at the fact that these studies used a 1994 definition of gender dysphoria under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (which was updated in 2013). As Dr. Turban tells me, “these were studies of very young prepubertal children, who aren’t candidates for gender-affirming medical interventions under current guidelines.”
So what good research is out there?
In 2022, a peer-reviewed study on the persistence of gender dysphoria in young people was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics. The research found that the vast majority of trans young people who started socially transitioning still identified with their new gender five years on. Only eight of the 317 children reverted back to the sex they were assigned at birth. So, not only have the British press relied on bad, outdated research, they have also actively ignored (or suppressed) research showing the exact opposite of their claim.
What’s striking is not the fact that the previous research has already been debunked, but rather the way in which this rhetoric is rearing its ugly head again in mainstream discourse with little to no fact checking by journalists and editors who have a clear political agenda. They are trying to make a new version of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” happen as evidence to dramatically restrict or eliminate access to gender-affirming care.
The idea that gender dysphoria is a “phase” taps into broader cultural, social and political anxieties desperately searching for an explanation about the rise in the number of young people coming out as trans. Consequently, the moral panic whipped up by the media debate about trans healthcare means people aren’t actually learning about what life is really like for young trans people.
“Transgender youth suffer from dramatic mental health disparities compared to their cisgender peers.” says Dr. Turban. “We generally see that this is due to a combination of distress from their bodies not aligning with their gender identities and from the stigma transgender people face in today’s society.”
The rising attacks and growing rollback on trans healthcare globally makes it increasingly urgent for us to be attuned to and guard against myths and conspiracies promoted by anti-trans groups, politicians and charlatans.
While the new Labour government may not be as bad on paper as the Tories, they don’t get a free pass. That’s why we should take hope and learn from groups like Trans Kids Deserve Better who spent four days on a ledge of the NHS administration building in London demanding better trans healthcare and support for young people. Real empowerment and change will only come when we give young people a real chance to take back their lives.
Jeffrey Ingold (he/him) is a freelance journalist covering LGBTQ+ issues, music and culture. He previously worked as the Head of Media for Europe's largest LGBTQ+ charity, Stonewall.
The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project is partially funded by The Walkley Foundation, and proudly pays queer writers, journalists and experts to write about LGBTQIA+ representation in media and culture. To support writer-owned, independent, queer-led media, please consider subscribing - this is how we pay our writers!
 | A guest post by
|