Keir Starmer resigned as Labour leader having presided over some of the most sweeping rollbacks of trans rights in the Western world. His government banned puberty blockers, pushed bathroom exclusions, and cheered a court ruling that stripped trans people of legal gender recognition. Labour's poll numbers collapsed anyway. The lesson is not complicated.

Starmer is gone, Labour is polling at 19%, and trans people in the United Kingdom have been devastated in the process. He served just under two years after a landslide victory in 2024 that ended fourteen years of Conservative rule. In those two years, his government made the emergency ban on puberty blockers permanent, stopped new NHS hormone prescriptions for trans young people, and then turned its attention to the private clinics that desperate families had fled to as a last resort, restricting those too. Trans young people in this country now face some of the most hostile healthcare policies in the Western democratic world.

And it did not stop with healthcare. In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that "sex" in the Equality Act means assigned sex at birth, stripping trans people of legal recognition of their gender. Starmer celebrated the ruling, calling it "much-needed clarity" and declaring "a woman is an adult female." The government's equality watchdog followed by describing trans women as "biological men" and issuing guidance to exclude them from single-sex spaces. Starmer then urged public institutions to move on bathroom exclusions "as soon as possible." Universities, hospitals, Parliament, and sporting bodies complied. ILGA-Europe subsequently reclassified the United Kingdom alongside Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Russia for having no functioning legal or administrative process for legal gender recognition. A country that once positioned itself as a leader on equality is now in that company.

The Cass Review sits at the centre of much of this. Published under the Conservatives and condemned by gender medicine experts internationally for its reliance on advisors connected to anti-trans advocacy networks and its selective reading of the evidence, it should have been set aside. Labour embraced it wholeheartedly anyway, and used it as the scientific cover for dismantling trans youth care. When the evidence base for a policy position has been this widely discredited by clinicians and researchers, choosing to build on it anyway is a choice, not an inevitability.

Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary who made the puberty blocker ban permanent, publicly announced he regretted ever having said "trans women are women." I have heard so many trans people describe what it feels like to watch a minister say that: not just a policy disagreement, but a declaration that their existence is something to be apologised for. That is what was done in the name of political calculation.

Here is what makes me most heartsick about all of this. It did not work. As Labour's numbers fell, the instinct was apparently to keep pushing in the same direction, as though one more concession would stabilise things. It never does. The party lost 1,500 council seats. The landslide majority that looked so transformative two years ago is now wreckage. And trans people are left with nothing except the harm that was done to them along the way.

Erin Reed's analysis draws a direct line from this to the choices facing the Democratic Party in the United States, and I think she is right to draw it. The logic of "sacrifice the vulnerable group and the attacks will stop" does not hold, because the attacks were never really about the group in question. They are about finding the softest target to push a politics of fear. There is no amount of trans people thrown under the bus that satisfies that appetite. The next target is already being lined up.

What I keep thinking about are not the politicians. I keep thinking about the teenagers who should have been able to access puberty blockers and could not. The families who were told that evidence-based care for their child was now forbidden. The trans women who walked into a public building and found guidance on the wall telling them they did not belong there, endorsed by the government of their own country. These are not abstractions. These are real people, real harm, and it was done deliberately by a government that knew exactly what it was doing.

The trans community in the UK did not create this situation. They were simply the ones asked to pay for it. They are still paying.

For anyone watching from elsewhere and wondering whether capitulation on trans rights is a viable political strategy: the evidence is in. It is not. It costs trans people enormously, it costs the party that does it anyway, and the only people who come out ahead are the ones who wanted the harm done in the first place.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate. She is the founder of GenderGP and writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.