The Word “Fury”: What the Headlines About Steph Richards Are Really Saying
When the press reaches for “outrage” over a trans woman’s appointment to a healthcare charity, it is worth pausing to ask what that outrage is really about.
Somewhere in Portsmouth, a woman is waiting for a diagnosis. She has been in pain for years, maybe a decade, told that it is normal, told to manage it, told to come back when it gets worse. She has cried in a GP’s office and been handed a leaflet. She found Endometriosis South Coast because someone told her about it, or because she typed her symptoms into a search engine at two in the morning when the pain would not let her sleep. She found a charity run by people who care, who fight, who show up at Parliament to make sure her condition is not invisible. She is not furious about who runs that charity; she is grateful.
The headlines, though, are using the word “fury.” The Times, GB News, the Daily Mail: all of them reaching for “fury” and “outrage” to describe the reaction to Steph Richards being appointed as parliamentary engagement officer for Endometriosis South Coast. What we might reasonably ask is: fury at what, exactly?
The Question Nobody Is Asking
Steph Richards has spent more than two decades in women’s healthcare advocacy. She worked alongside two pregnancy charities as a consultant and researcher, contributed to work that saved hundreds of babies’ lives, won an Inspirational Women of Portsmouth Award in 2023, and built TransLucent into a respected voice in human rights. She knows how Parliament works. She knows how to get a condition onto an agenda, into a committee room, in front of the people who can actually change things.
So the question worth asking is whether not having endometriosis personally disqualifies someone from this role. Let us ask that question in a few other directions. Does a cardiologist need to have had a heart attack? Does a paediatrician need to be a child? Does an oncologist need to have experienced cancer? Laura Kerby leads Prostate Cancer UK and she does not have a prostate. Simon Cooke leads MSI Reproductive Choices, an organisation that provides reproductive healthcare primarily to women, and he is not a woman. Are there headlines about fury and outrage over those appointments? Is anyone calling them “absolutely ridiculous” or “fundamentally discordant”?
The fury, when we look honestly at the coverage, has nothing to do with the role and everything to do with who Steph Richards is.
What “Lived Experience” Actually Means in Healthcare
The trouble is that the argument about lived experience sounds reasonable on the surface, and that is exactly what makes it worth examining carefully.
Of course lived experience matters. When a woman sits in a consulting room and describes pain that has been dismissed for years, it matters that her advocate understands what that dismissal feels like. It matters that the charity speaks in a language that reflects the reality of the people it serves. Nobody is arguing otherwise, and nobody should.
The question is whether the parliamentary engagement officer must personally have endometriosis in order to advocate effectively for better policy, more funding, shorter diagnosis times, and greater awareness. That is a very different question. A parliamentary officer’s role is to understand the condition deeply, to listen to the people who live with it, and to translate that experience into language that moves policy. Steph Richards has spent her career doing exactly that kind of work in women’s health.
The charity’s own founder and trustees all have endometriosis or adenomyosis. The lived experience is there, in the room, shaping every decision. What they needed was someone who could walk into Parliament and make things happen, and they chose the person they believed could do that. That is how organisations work.
“Fury”
I want to name something directly, because I think people deserve honesty about what they are seeing in these headlines.
The word “fury” is doing a great deal of work. It presents transphobia as a legitimate emotional response, as something so reasonable that it deserves a headline, a quote from a novelist, a comment from a gender-critical MP. It packages a prejudice as a concern.
Rosie Duffield, the independent MP for Canterbury, says she is “uncomfortable.” Amanda Craig calls the appointment “absolutely ridiculous” and “fundamentally discordant and wrong.” The Daily Mail reaches for “fury.” GB News reaches for “outrage.” These are not words about healthcare policy or endometriosis advocacy. These are words about a trans woman existing in a space where some people have decided she has no right to be, and dressing that decision up as principle does not make it something other than what it is.
The Pattern
This is not the first time this has happened to Steph Richards. She served as CEO of Endometriosis South Coast from late 2023, and stepped down in May 2024 after sustained media pressure. In the week of that backlash, the charity received a year’s worth of donations in a single week, which tells you something important about how many people understood what was really happening. She left not because she had done anything wrong, but because the noise became impossible to sustain.
Now she is back, in a different capacity, doing advocacy work she is genuinely qualified to do. The press has found the story again. The same words are being deployed: fury, outrage, inappropriate, uncomfortable.
We need to be honest about what this pattern is. It is a sustained effort to push trans women out of public life, out of professional roles, out of charities and committees and meeting rooms, dressed up as concern for the very women those organisations exist to serve. It is happening across multiple sectors, and it falls on real people who are simply trying to do useful work in the world. We should be able to put the best person in any role, judged on their skills, their record, and their commitment, not prejudiced by their identity or any other personal characteristic.
To the Women With Endometriosis
If you have endometriosis, you have been let down by healthcare systems for a very long time. According to the most recent data from Endometriosis UK, the average time to receive a diagnosis in the UK has now reached nine years and four months. Nine years and four months of pain that gets dismissed, minimised, and misattributed. You deserve advocates who will fight for you in every room that matters, loudly and without apology.
Steph Richards is one of those advocates. Her birth sex is not the thing that matters here. What matters is whether she will show up, do the work, and make noise in the right places, and her track record across more than two decades of healthcare and human rights advocacy suggests she will.
The fury in those headlines is not yours. It was manufactured for you, by people with a different agenda entirely. Whether to accept it as your own is your choice, not theirs.
The future for trans people in public life is one where this kind of campaign loses its power. Every time we name what “fury” actually means, we bring that future a little closer.
If this piece resonated with you, please share it. The more people who can see what “fury” actually means in this context, the better.
Dr Helen Webberley, Gender Specialist and Medical Educator
Resources and Further Reading
GB News: Trans row, outrage after transgender woman appointed as endometriosis charity representative: https://www.gbnews.com/news/trans-row-transgender-woman-appointed-endometriosis-charity-amanda-craig-rosie-duffield
ITV News: Endometriosis charity slams transphobic reaction to appointing trans woman as CEO (2023): https://www.itv.com/news/2023-11-14/endometriosis-charity-slams-transphobic-reaction-to-new-trans-ceo
Civil Society: Health charity CEO steps down after transphobic reactions to appointment (2024): https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/health-charity-ceo-steps-down-after-transphobic-reactions-to-appointment.html
Endometriosis UK: New report highlighting alarming increase in endometriosis diagnosis times (March 2026): https://www.endometriosis-uk.org/endometriosis-uk-release-new-report-highlighting-alarming-increase-endometriosis-diagnosis-times
Endometriosis South Coast: https://endometriosissouthcoast.com
TransLucent: https://translucent.org.uk
Steph Richards: National Diversity Awards 2025 shortlist: https://www.nationaldiversityawards.co.uk/2025-shortlist/steph-richards/
Prostate Cancer UK: Laura Kerby, Chief Executive: https://prostatecanceruk.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-people/laura-kerby
MSI Reproductive Choices: Simon Cooke, CEO: https://www.msichoices.org/who-we-are/our-team/simon-cooke/
There is a lot of hypocrisy going on, as usual, in the right-wing press. When Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, a woman who donated to an anti-trans womans court case funder, they were not furious, saying that she was the wrong person to head an equality organisation. And the biggest hypocrisy of all, is that their journalists who report on the numerous fields of news worthy events, unlike Steph, often have little or no lived experience or knowledge about the subject on which they report.