Labour attends Pride, flies the flag, and posts the rainbow graphics, but in 2025 and 2026 the party has overseen a puberty blocker ban, failed to legislate against conversion therapy, retreated on gender recognition, and left trans people's human rights to be debated, delayed, and denied. Visibility without protection is not solidarity.
Is this really about keeping politics out of Pride?
Every year the argument surfaces: Pride should not be political. Every year trans people point out that their existence already is political, because politicians have made it so. The question was never whether politics belongs at Pride. The question is whether the politicians who turn up there are doing their jobs the other eleven months of the year.
There is no shortage of LGBTQ+ initiative announcements, flag-raising ceremonies, and civil service inclusion statements. What there is a shortage of is protection. Rights are not visibility. A photo at a Pride march is not a commitment to legislate. And when the people marching past you have spent the preceding twelve months overseeing some of the most regressive trans policy in recent British history, the disconnect stops being a nuance and starts being a political calculation.
The puberty blocker ban: Labour's own record
The ban on the sale and supply of puberty blockers on private prescription to trans young people was introduced under the previous Conservative government, but Labour has not reversed it. In fact, the party has entrenched it. The NHS pathway that might theoretically have offered an alternative remains essentially inaccessible: services are under-resourced, waiting lists stretch to years, and specialist expertise is desperately scarce.
What this means in practice is that a generation of trans young people is going through puberty in bodies that cause them profound distress, with no medical pathway available to them, and with a Labour government that chose to maintain the architecture of that denial. These are young people whose rights have been debated, delayed, and denied, as one Birmingham activist put it plainly. And the politicians have stood by and allowed it to happen.
Puberty blockers are not experimental. They have been used for decades, including for children with precocious puberty, and their use in gender-affirming care is supported by the World Health Organisation, the Endocrine Society, WPATH, and major professional bodies across medicine. The Cass Review, which was used to justify the ban, has been internationally discredited, with many gender medicine experts publishing detailed rebuttals of its methodology and its citation practices. Endorsing a ban built on that foundation is a political choice, and Labour made it.
Conversion therapy: the exclusion that was always the point
The commitment to ban conversion therapy has been on the Labour manifesto in various forms for years. What the legislation as currently framed does not do is protect trans people. The exclusion of trans people from conversion therapy protections is not an oversight. It is a decision, and it reflects exactly the kind of political positioning that Pride visibility is designed to obscure.
Conversion therapy is the practice of attempting to change or suppress someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. It causes documented psychological harm. Excluding trans people from the ban while marching with them at Pride is not a principled distinction. It is an accommodation of the loudest hostile voices, and trans people are paying the price of that accommodation with their mental health.
The Supreme Court ruling and Labour's silence
The Supreme Court 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, concluding that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate in the female gender does not fall within the Act's definition of a woman. The Court did not change the law. It offered one interpretation of it, and that interpretation has been widely criticised by legal commentators, equality organisations, healthcare professionals, and human rights advocates as inconsistent with what Parliament intended when both the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Equality Act 2010 were passed.
The Supreme Court is meant to be separate from the political state. But politicians are not meant to be neutral bystanders when a court interpretation strips legal recognition from a group of people. What was needed was strength from Labour, a clear statement that the party would legislate to restore what the ruling had undermined, a commitment to trans people that their legal recognition was not negotiable. What trans people largely received was caution, equivocation, and the suggestion that a complex situation needed careful consideration.
Trans people do not have the luxury of careful consideration. They are living the consequences of that ruling right now.
School guidance: the draft that kept being treated as settled
The UK Government's guidance on gender-questioning children in schools remains draft. It has not been formally enacted. And yet it has been treated in many quarters as though it carries the full weight of statutory guidance, shaping school policy and, in some cases, removing trans young people's ability to be addressed by their correct name or pronoun at school.
Labour's failure to clarify that this guidance is draft, to challenge the hostile framing embedded in it, or to replace it with something grounded in the evidence and the wellbeing of trans young people has left children more vulnerable, not less. Trans young people need schools to be safe. They need to be able to trust that the adults around them will not be instructed to withhold the basic dignity of being called who they are.
Women's Conference and the messaging problem
Labour's Women's Conference has, in recent years, become a space where gender-critical voices have found a platform and where trans-inclusive language has been quietly dropped or disputed. The messaging that has emerged from those spaces has repeatedly centred a framing that positions trans women outside the category of women, and Labour's leadership has been reluctant to push back clearly.
This is not a minor comms issue. When a party's internal culture allows a subset of members to consistently frame trans inclusion as a threat to women's rights, and when the leadership responds with studied ambiguity rather than clarity, the message to trans people is that their belonging in the party is conditional. Rainbow lanyards at conference do not undo that.
What strength from politicians actually looks like
I have heard from so many trans people, and from the parents and partners and friends who love them, about what it feels like to watch a party you voted for, organised for, and trusted choose again and again to manage hostility rather than defend you. The word that comes up most is betrayal, and it is the right word.
Strength from politicians does not mean managing the discourse carefully. It means legislating. It means reversing the puberty blocker ban. It means extending conversion therapy protections to trans people without carve-outs. It means responding to the Supreme Court ruling by clarifying, in statute, that trans people's legal recognition is real and that it holds. It means issuing school guidance that protects trans young people rather than treating their existence as a safeguarding risk. It means turning up to Pride as an act of accountability, not an act of branding.
The politicians who attend Pride while overseeing policies that harm trans people are not making a mistake. They are making a calculation. They have decided that rainbow visibility carries enough political capital to offset the cost of letting trans rights be debated, delayed, and denied. Trans people deserve politicians who have decided otherwise.
Visibility is not enough
None of this means that visibility is worthless. Seeing politicians stand alongside trans people matters. Representation matters. But visibility that is not backed by protection is worse than silence in one specific way: it allows the party to claim solidarity while delivering abandonment, and it makes it harder for trans people to name what is happening to them without being told they are being ungrateful.
What the trans community needs from Labour is not better optics. It is legislation that protects trans young people's access to healthcare, that includes trans people in conversion therapy law without exception, that responds to the Supreme Court ruling with something other than studied neutrality, and that produces school guidance built on the evidence of what keeps trans young people safe. That is what solidarity looks like when it has to do its actual work.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes and advocates on gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.
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