Labour's War on Trans People.
We have become used to regarding the attacks on trans people's human rights, like the attacks on groups like refugees and asylum seekers, Muslims and others, as "Culture wars" a perception the media has encouraged. The lowest hanging fruit and the wedge towards more repression. The Starmer government is ready to take away trans people's human rights in full, gutting the Equality Act, discrediting it and leaving open the way for further rightwing attacks on everyone else. The Vichy gays, women's rights campaigners and more, will find the leopards have turned their attention to their own faces.
The capitulation by this Labour government, to the far right's transphobic agenda will not stop with us. If there is there anyone who really thinks they spent millions of pounds worth of both cash and kind just to harm trans people they are in for a rude awakening. Things everyone else has taken for granted for so long; safe and legal abortion and equal marriage will be under even greater attack very soon. Those are their real targets. Oppressing trans people was just their way in, testing both their own systems and finding out where their supporters are in positions of power (or putting them there), how to rally them and use their considerable resources to change opinions and deploy lawfare - rather than through parliament and democratic processes - to change the law.
The only consolation will be that the hated Labour Party (which, in the space of less than two years, has gone from victorious to despised by all but around one-sixth - and counting, downwards) of voters, is screwed. It has gone, it is the Old World dying while the New World struggles to be born; an apt metaphor given the huge demographic changes now occurring.
Roughly an additional 2 million voters will join the electoral register in the next 2-3 years - that is additional to the usual number of young people reaching the age of 18. The first part of the 2008-2012 baby boom. Meanwhile, in almost the same timeframe the 1945-1949 baby boom will start to reach average life expectancy next year, and by the next election, half of the first baby boom will have passed on, additionally removing 2 million voters from the electoral register. A net shift of voter power from old to young of around four million votes. two million largely right-wing voters will be replaced by two million mostly left-wing voters. But, we have to remember, there is a class and gender dimension also. Working-class men tend to die younger than middle-class women. Indeed many of the former will have already passed on. So the demographic Starmer seems to be most assiduously courting, will be considerably smaller come the next election, replaced by people who are far more likely to vote Green, Plaid Cymru or SNP. A demographic time-bomb is ticking under Labour.
It needs to be remembered that already Labour has lost more than half of the 9.7 million votes it got in 2024. That puts them on around 4.8 million, a number that these demographic changes will see fall further, and, despite an intense smear campaign in mainstream media, we will see the Green Party's support increase.
Labour's Toilet Ban will compound this, but not because it will make any difference to the demographic tsunami already starting to engulf Labour. Labour's Toilet Ban is the kind of thing that, like Margaret Thatcher's Section 28, will live long in people's memories, especially in the memories of the young. Trans people in the UK are a disproportionately young young demographic, as were the victims of Section 28 and they will be telling their stories for decades to come, choking off any attempts by Labour to resurrect itself as anything other than the Utterly Vile Party. Labour chose its demographic, chose its policies to please its chosen media oligarchs and chose to try and attract voters who will never come while choosing to alienate its core supporters. Tax cuts, minimum wage levels, prices, especially of petrol, may affect more people than the attempted genocide of 1% of the population. But, in 5-10 years time no-one is going to remember the cost of petrol in May and June 2026. Those affected, either directly or indirectly, by Labour turning them or their loved-ones into second-class citizens, will remember everything in high-definition technicolour well after the 100th anniversary of the end of war that kicked off the first baby boom. Whatever heirs there may be to Starmer and Burnham they will not be allowed to forget it.
The war on trans people started with transphobic hate groups getting opaque funding from the US, and probably also the Russian far right. This largesse enabled them to campaign freely and dedicate time to their hate campaigns. After that the oligarch media joined in. Amnesty International's recent corpus linguistics report shows just how biased and trans-exclusionary the media is. The multimillionaire and billionaire owners of these 'news' sources taking full advantage of their abuse of power to distort every perception and obliterate every fact. Then came the well-funded litigation, the lawfare the wealthy chose to deploy to distort the law and legal processes with their overwhelming economic power.
Labour didn't just sit on its hands and lap it up, it actively colluded with these wealthy bigots and their lackeys to deny an entire demographic its basic human rights, all the while failing to see what it was colluding with (or maybe not IDK...?). For them this was just another culture war they didn't want to get involved in, something they just had to protect themselves against to avoid the disapproval of those crucial electors, the obscenely rich.
What they failed to see however was that, this is a group of disgustingly rich haters targeting one of the poorest, most marginalised and most vulnerable groups in society. It is the very rich against the very poor. That is not a culture war.
It is class war.
