Labour has attended Pride events and voiced support for LGBT+ people while pursuing policies that harm trans people: banning puberty blockers, narrowing GRC access following the Supreme Court ruling, and excluding trans people from the conversion therapy ban. Visibility without protection is not support. It is politics.
What does political betrayal actually mean for trans people?
Betrayal is a strong word. I use it deliberately. Betrayal is not simply disagreement, and it is not the ordinary disappointment of a party that does less than you hoped. Betrayal is when someone who said they were with you acts against you while still claiming to be with you. That is what a growing number of trans people, their families, and their allies are describing when they look at what Labour has done in government.
People have told me, repeatedly and with real pain, that they canvassed for Labour, that they believed the promises, that they thought a change of government would mean a change in direction. What they got instead was a government that banned puberty blockers, refused to put trans people inside the conversion therapy ban, and took no serious steps to address the consequences of the Supreme Court's Equality Act ruling. And then sent ministers to walk at Pride.
That combination is not a nuanced policy position. It is a performance of inclusion alongside a practice of exclusion, and trans people are not obliged to pretend otherwise.
The puberty blocker ban: a political decision presented as clinical caution
The puberty blocker situation deserves specificity, because the framing matters. The ban on the sale and supply of puberty blockers on private prescription to trans youth was introduced under the previous Conservative government and has not been reversed under Labour. It was presented, and continues to be presented, as a response to clinical uncertainty, with the Cass Review cited as justification.
The Cass Review is internationally discredited. Major gender medicine bodies across Europe and North America have published detailed rebuttals of its methodology and its citation practices. The evidence base that the review claimed to find absent was, in reality, dismissed through criteria applied to no other area of paediatric medicine. Clinicians who work in this field, researchers who study it, and international standards bodies including WPATH and the Endocrine Society have all made clear that gender-affirming care for young people, including puberty suppression, is supported by evidence and by decades of clinical practice.
Puberty blockers have been used for decades in the treatment of precocious puberty. They pause puberty; they do not end it. The decision to frame them as uniquely dangerous or experimental when used for trans young people is a political decision, not a clinical one. And a Labour government that allows that framing to stand, and the ban to remain, has made a choice. That choice has caused real harm to real young people who are now going through puberty changes they did not want, with no clinical route to prevent them.
Delay is not neutral. Worsening dysphoria, the psychological toll of an unwanted puberty, the social consequences for a teenager whose body is developing in a direction that feels deeply wrong: these are not abstract risks. They are what happens when a government decides that inaction is the safe option. It is not.
The conversion therapy exclusion: the clearest possible signal
Conversion therapy is the practice of attempting to change or suppress a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. It is harmful. The evidence that it causes harm is not contested in any serious clinical setting. Every major psychological and psychiatric body has condemned it. And Labour, in its proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy, has at various points signalled that trans people may not be included in that protection, or that the inclusion is conditional in ways it is not for LGB people.
Think about what that means. A therapist could work with a trans teenager and systematically try to persuade them that they are not trans, that their identity is wrong, that they should suppress it, and under the proposed approach, that might not be banned. A parent could send their trans child to a religious programme designed to talk them out of who they are, and that might not be banned either.
The justification offered is usually that trans identity is different from sexual orientation, that questions of gender are more complex, that protecting free speech and religious liberty requires a carve-out. None of that survives scrutiny. The harm of attempting to change or suppress a trans person's identity is identical in kind to the harm of attempting to change or suppress a gay person's orientation. The therapeutic bodies say so. The research says so. The survivors of conversion practices say so.
Excluding trans people from this legislation is not a compromise. It is a decision that trans people matter less. A government that marches at Pride and then makes that decision has told trans people something important about where they actually stand.
The Supreme Court ruling and what Labour has done with it
The Supreme Court's ruling in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers interpreted the Equality Act 2010 as meaning that the terms "woman" and "sex" refer to biological sex for the purposes of that Act. The ruling did not change the law as Parliament wrote it. It offered one interpretation of that law, an interpretation that many legal commentators, equality organisations, and trans rights advocates argue is inconsistent with Parliament's original intent when both the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010 were enacted.
Trans people retain protection under the Equality Act through the characteristic of gender reassignment. The ruling did not remove that. But the practical consequences of narrowing the definition of "woman" within the Act are significant, particularly for trans women accessing services, facilities, and spaces. And the Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance that followed that ruling is itself still in draft form.
What has Labour done in response? Very little that amounts to a genuine defence of trans people's position. The conversation I keep hearing from trans women is one of exhaustion: the sense that a hostile legal and political environment is being allowed to bed in, normalised step by step, while the government that was supposed to represent a break from that environment offers warm words and watches it happen.
A government that genuinely supported trans people would have responded to that ruling by clarifying its intentions through policy and guidance. It has not done so with any urgency.
Visibility as cover
Here is what I think is actually happening. Pride attendance, inclusive rhetoric, and the language of allyship function as political cover. They allow a party to maintain the support of LGBT+ voters and allies, to occupy the progressive space in public discourse, while pursuing or tolerating policies that would be unacceptable if the gap between the rhetoric and the reality were fully visible.
It works because most people, including most LGBT+ people, are not paying close attention to the specific policy detail on puberty blockers or conversion therapy legislation. They see a minister at Pride and they feel reassured. That reassurance is the point. The trans people who are paying close attention, who are living inside the consequences of these decisions, are a small enough group that their anger can be absorbed without significant electoral cost.
That is a calculation. And it is one that trans people and their families are right to be furious about.
What does genuine allyship from a government look like?
It looks like reversing the puberty blocker ban. It looks like including trans people in the conversion therapy ban without conditions that apply to no one else. It looks like responding to the Supreme Court ruling with clear policy guidance that protects trans people in practice. It looks like funding NHS gender services adequately so that waiting times are not measured in years. It looks like resisting the political pressure to treat trans people as a culture-war battleground and instead treating trans people as citizens who deserve the same rights, the same healthcare, and the same protection as everyone else.
None of that requires political courage in any extraordinary sense. It requires doing what was promised. That is not a high bar. It is the minimum.
Trans people in this country have been waiting for a government that will do the minimum for a very long time. Many of them voted Labour believing that wait was over. The anger and grief of discovering it was not is entirely legitimate, and I think it deserves to be named clearly rather than processed quietly as just one more disappointment.
The knowledge that Labour is not the Conservatives and the knowledge that "better than the alternative" is not the same as good enough are both true. Trans people deserve good enough, at least. They deserve better than that.
Comments