The prime minister has doubled down on the transphobic joke he made during PMQs, while he believed Brianna Ghey’s mother was in the public gallery. But his callousness comes as no surprise
Rishi Sunak has refused to apologise to the grieving family of Brianna Ghey after making a transphobic joke during Prime Minister’s Questions.
At PMQs on Wednesday (February 7), Sunak challenged Starmer on the number of policy U-turns the Labour Party has made while in opposition. “Tuition fees, childcare, second referendums,” he said at the despatch box. “Defining a woman… although in fairness, that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn.” Many Tories laughed. At the time, MPs believed Esther Ghey, Brianna’s mother, was listening from the House of Commons visitors’ gallery (Ghey was slightly late to PMQs, and so missed this exchange).
Brianna, a 16-year-old trans girl, was brutally murdered by two teenagers in Cheshire last February who were named and sentenced to life in prison last week. “Of all the weeks to say that,” Starmer said in response to Sunak’s heartless comments. “When Brianna’s mother is in this chamber – shame.” Brianna’s father, Peter Spooner, called Sunak’s remarks “degrading” and “absolutely dehumanising”, and called on the Prime Minister to apologise.
Sunak has since declined to apologise and doubled down on his comments. Speaking to Sky News, he claimed that he was commenting on Starmer’s “proven track record of multiple U-turns on major policies” and that he didn’t want to use Brianna’s tragic death to “detract” from the point he was making.
But there is no way to disentangle the link between Brianna’s murder and transphobic rhetoric. There is a clear, unequivocal connection between the normalisation of transphobic attitudes and language and real-life, physical violence against transgender people. The judge Mrs Justice Yip acknowledged in her sentencing remarks that transphobia had played a role in Brianna’s murder, as one of her killers referred to her in text messages with unambiguously transphobic and dehumanising language before going on to stab her.
Plus, according to analysis by author and trans advocate Shon Faye, in 2020 alone The Times and The Sunday Times published “over 300 articles” on trans issues, all of which were anti-trans in nature. Transphobic violence has been rising in tandem with this deluge of anti-trans rhetoric in the media, with the number of reported transphobic hate crimes quadrupling between 2015 and 2020. According to The Met, there were 23 transphobic hate crimes across London in 2001, and 428 in 2021.
We know that anti-trans rhetoric is no joke and has real, violent, tragic consequences. And yet Sunak is still blowing his transphobic dog whistle from the despatch box and making crass jibes about the Leader of the Opposition being unable to “define a woman”. His equalities minister is still parroting baseless anti-trans conspiracy theories. Opposing trans rights is still a hill he will choose to die on, even when a grieving father has plainly asked him to apologise for his insensitive, harmful comments. Starmer, it should be noted, is little better: he has refused to sack Labour MP Rosie Duffield for making transphobic remarks and recently dropped a pledge to allow trans people to self-ID.
BREAKING: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declines to apologise for transgender jibe despite calls from Brianna Ghey's family
— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 8, 2024
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Some anti-trans commentators have claimed that Sunak’s comments at PMQs have been blown out of proportion, that this is a “non-story”, that Starmer broke parliamentary rules by referring to a person in the public gallery, and that it none of it matters because Esther Ghey was not in the public gallery at the time Sunak made his comments anyway. But this is all totally besides the point. The point is that hate crimes against transgender people in England are at record levels, with a recent Home Office report attributing this rise to the frequent, inflammatory transphobic comments made by politicians and the media. The point is that Brianna Ghey could still be alive if the UK wasn’t hellbent on persecuting people like her.
It’s telling that Sunak and many right-wing pundits have used the correct name and pronouns for Brianna despite their vicious, vocal opposition to self-ID and their idiotic, wilfully ignorant conflation of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. This plainly highlights how most transphobes are so fixated on baseless conspiracies and imagined threats that they remain totally devoid of compassion for trans people living in the UK and ignorant of the real issues trans people face. Now, Brianna’s case has devastatingly and publicly illustrated that trans people are far, far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.
Brianna deserves to be remembered with respect, compassion, and humanity, but not because she is somehow an ‘exception’ to the transphobic narratives subscribed to by the likes of Sunak. Brianna, like every other trans person in the UK, was just trying to get on with her life. Politicians and media commentators alike would do well to remember this.