Keir Starmer's Labour government banned puberty blockers, attempted a nationwide bathroom ban, and celebrated a Supreme Court ruling stripping trans people of legal gender recognition. Labour's vote share collapsed anyway. The lesson for any party tempted by the same strategy is that there is no concession large enough to satisfy the people demanding it, and the communities sacrificed will not forget.

I have been watching events in the UK with a heaviness I find difficult to describe. Not surprise, exactly. More like the particular grief of watching something entirely preventable unfold in slow motion, every step of the damage visible and named in advance, and nobody in power willing to stop.

Keir Starmer won a landslide in 2024. Four hundred and eleven seats. Fourteen years of Conservative rule ended. The trans people and families I have spoken with over the years told me, cautiously, that they hoped things might finally begin to turn. That the cruelty of the previous government, the waiting lists running into years, the hostile briefings, the slow strangulation of care, might at last be unwound.

What happened instead was worse. Not the same. Worse.

The Conservatives had placed an emergency ban on puberty blockers. Labour made it permanent. The NHS had already stopped issuing new hormone prescriptions to trans youth. Labour left that in place and then turned its attention to the private clinics that desperate families had turned to as a last resort, restricting their ability to operate. Trans young people in this country now have virtually no pathway to care. That is not a political position. It is a medical emergency presented in parliamentary language, and it happened under a government that won power promising something better.

Then came April 2025, and the Supreme Court ruling that the word "sex" in the Equality Act 2010 means assigned sex at birth only. Starmer's response was to call it "much-needed clarity" and declare that "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 bar trans people from facilities "as soon as possible." Universities, hospitals, Parliament, and sporting bodies complied. ILGA-Europe reclassified the United Kingdom alongside Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Russia for having no functioning legal or administrative process for legal gender recognition.

The United Kingdom, reclassified alongside Hungary and Russia. This is the country that passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, one of the first in the world to do so. That is the distance this government chose to travel, and it chose it, step by deliberate step.

Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary who made the puberty blocker ban permanent, publicly said he regretted ever saying "trans women are women." Andy Burnham, widely expected to succeed Starmer and someone who had previously defended trans women's access to women's facilities, reversed himself to court right-wing voters. One by one, the people who should have known better decided that trans people were a safe thing to sacrifice.

And then Labour's poll numbers cratered anyway.

The party that won 411 seats now polls at 19%. They lost 1,500 council seats. Starmer announced his resignation after a mutiny from within his own party. All of it, every act of cruelty, every reversal, every public statement distancing themselves from trans people, and it made no difference whatsoever to the political outcome. None.

Erin Reed, writing in Erin in the Morning, makes the point that American Democrats are watching this and need to draw the right conclusion. She is correct. Some House Democrats voted to give the Trump administration more power to pull funding from schools supporting trans students. Gavin Newsom retreated on trans sports. There are voices inside the Democratic Party whispering the same thing that was whispered inside Labour: throw this community to the wolves and the centre will come back to you.

What Starmer's resignation demonstrates, with painful clarity, is that those voices are wrong. There is no amount of concession that will satisfy the people demanding it. The attacks do not stop because you agreed to one thing. They simply move to the next target, and then the next, and the party that capitulated is left with nothing: no principles, no coalition, no votes, and a record of harm that the communities it abandoned will not forget.

I think about the trans young people in this country, and their families, who came through years of Conservative hostility holding on to the hope that things would change. I think about what it meant to watch a Labour government do more damage than the one it replaced, and to hear the people who caused that damage speak as if it were responsible governance. That is not a political calculation I can view with any equanimity. It is a human catastrophe, measured in delayed care, in distress, in families left without any pathway forward.

The lesson Erin draws is the one that needs saying clearly and repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic: the greatest long-term threat to trans people is not a hostile party in government. It is the possibility that the only alternative party decides trans people are a liability rather than a community worth protecting. Once both major parties have abandoned you, the harm becomes extraordinarily hard to reverse.

Labour embraced transphobia, lost everything, and left trans people with nothing. That is the record. That is what Starmer is walking away from. Any party considering the same path should look at that record and choose differently, not because it is the strategically optimal move, but because trans people are human beings whose lives, healthcare, and dignity are not a bargaining chip.

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, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP.