Andy Burnham has one of the longest LGBTQ+ records in Labour politics, from marching against Section 28 as a student in 1988 to defending trans women's right to use women's toilets in 2022. His response to the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act has been cautious, and trans people need more than a strong historical record from a potential prime minister.

On 22 June, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as Labour leader, though he will remain as prime minister while a replacement is found. Burnham, who won the Makerfield by-election earlier this month after standing down as Mayor of Greater Manchester, is widely expected to stand. So now is exactly the right moment to look at what his record actually shows, rather than what his reputation suggests.

A record that goes back further than most

Before he entered politics, before he held any office at all, Burnham joined a march against Section 28 in 1988 as a student. That is worth noting, not because a student march is a policy decision, but because it tells you something about where his instincts were before there was any career advantage in having them.

From 2003 onwards, his parliamentary voting record on LGBTQ+ legislation was almost entirely consistent: repealing Section 28, civil partnerships in 2004, outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2007, IVF rights for lesbian couples in 2008, same-sex marriage in 2013. When he was Mayor of Greater Manchester, he appointed Carl Austin-Behan, a man who had been discharged from the RAF for being gay, as the city's LGBTQ+ adviser in 2018, and the same year launched an LGBTQ+ Equality Panel for Greater Manchester. In 2022 he formally apologised for the shameful treatment of LGBTQ+ people by Greater Manchester Police.

Despite being Catholic, he urged Pope Francis to support same-sex marriage during the 2015 Labour leadership contest, and PinkNews reported at the time that his public support for LGBTQ+ people had damaged relationships with members of his own family. That is not nothing. Plenty of politicians hold liberal views where there is no personal cost attached.

On trans rights specifically

In 2019, Burnham supported reform of the Gender Recognition Act and called for simplifying the legal recognition process for trans people. In 2022, he defended the right of trans women to use women's toilets, despite considerable backlash from gender-critical campaigners. He backed a conversion therapy ban covering all LGBTQ+ people, including trans people, that same year.

In 2020, he met with the LGB Alliance to discuss GRA reform. The LGB Alliance is an organisation widely criticised within LGBTQ+ communities for its position on trans rights, and that meeting drew criticism. His office responded by saying Burnham had made his support for the trans community very clear over the years, which is true, but the optics of the meeting were not lost on anyone.

Where his recent language gives me pause

After the Supreme Court's ruling on the Equality Act in 2025, Burnham said the EHRC guidance should be introduced in the "fairest and most compassionate way possible", and that single-sex spaces should be protected without "marginalising already marginalised communities".

I understand the political tightrope he is trying to walk. But that framing does something I find genuinely concerning: it treats a contested court interpretation as though it were settled law requiring implementation, rather than one reading of a statute that many legal experts, equality organisations, and human rights advocates consider inconsistent with Parliament's original intent. The Supreme Court did not change the Equality Act. It interpreted it, in a way that has attracted significant criticism. Draft EHRC guidance is not law. Burnham's language collapses those distinctions in a way that a potential prime minister should not.

The phrase "single-sex spaces should be protected" has become a way of signalling, often without saying so directly, that trans women should be excluded from women's services. Whether Burnham means it that way, I cannot say. But the absence of any direct statement about what that means for trans women in practice is the gap that matters.

What a Labour leader actually needs to say

Every time there is a leadership contest, trans people are told to be patient, to look at the record, to trust the instincts of someone who has been an ally for decades. And sometimes that is right. But the political climate has shifted dramatically since 2019, and a record built in a more hospitable era needs to be reaffirmed in this one, not just gestured at.

What I want to hear from Burnham, or from any candidate who wants to lead a party that claims to stand for equality, is something more concrete than compassion and fairness. Will he commit to rebuilding NHS gender services, which are stretched beyond breaking point? Will he look honestly at the evidence on puberty blockers, rather than deferring to a review that has been widely discredited internationally? Will he commit to a conversion practices ban that actually protects trans people, including trans children? Will he say, clearly, that the Supreme Court's interpretation is contested and that his government will not use it as a mandate to exclude trans people from public life?

Burnham's historical record is genuinely impressive, and I do not want to dismiss it. He has been more consistently supportive than most of his colleagues over a longer period of time, and that matters. But trans people are not asking to be rewarded with inclusion: they are asking to be treated as people. A future prime minister needs to be able to say that plainly, in the current climate, not just in the friendlier one that existed a decade ago.