British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reiterated his position on gender identity during a speech on Wednesday, asserting what he deemed “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman.”
This statement drew criticism from transgender rights activists while receiving enthusiastic applause from attendees at the Conservative Party Conference.
In addition to his remarks on gender identity, Sunak made other policy statements that he believed “shouldn’t be controversial.” These included a commitment to legislation ensuring that “sexual and sadistic” killers would receive life sentences and a call for greater transparency in education, allowing parents to have knowledge of what their children are being taught about relationships in school.
“Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women,” Sunak continued during his closing speech at his party’s annual gathering, held this year in Manchester. “And we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman — that’s just common sense.”
In April, Sunak drew attention when he concurred with a conservative interviewer’s assertion that all women, rather than 99 percent of them, “do not possess a penis.”
During that earlier incident, his tone was less confrontational as he emphasized the importance of compassion, understanding, and tolerance for those exploring their gender identity. However, he underscored his belief that the concept of biological sex remains fundamentally significant in discussions related to women’s rights and spaces.
In June, PinkNews, a British news outlet specializing in LGBTQ+ coverage, accused Sunak of ridiculing trans women. The outlet released what it claimed was a surreptitiously recorded video of the prime minister engaged in a conversation with conservative MPs.
In the video, a man purported to be Sunak is heard making a jest about Liberal Democrats party leader Ed Davey, suggesting that he has been occupied with trying to “persuade everyone that women unquestionably possess male anatomy.”
“You all know I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths at 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology,” the man in the video said.
A spokesperson for the prime minister defended those comments, saying it was “a joke aimed at a political opponent rather than a specific group.”
“We now have a British government and a prime minister that has said that it doesn’t recognize trans people,” Willoughby said. “If you don’t acknowledge a group of people exist, then obviously that group of people don’t have rights.”
More than 2,800 potential transgender hate crimes were reported between September 2001 and February 2022, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Service in Greater London. The number of reported incidents significantly increased starting in the mid-2010s, jumping from 75 incidents in 2013 to 428 in 2021.