Disgusting Transphobic Labour Leader Set Upon By Disgusting Transphobes
This Week in Barrel Scraping: A slip of the tongue led to a conspiracy theory that UK politician Keir Starmer has a trans son and many statements to the effect that having a trans child would be disqualifying for a polician on TERF Island.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
You’ve heard of the dreaded TIMs, “Trans Identified Males,” now prepare yourself for.
TICs! Trans! Identified! Children!
Wait. Let’s back up. If you aren’t super in the know when it comes to British politics, Keir Starmer has been the leader of the Labour Party since 2020. The Labour Party can best be described as analogous to the Democratic Party in America: Weak and ineffective on most issues, but forever positioning themselves as the only opposition to the nation’s vile conservative party, the Tories.
What’s fun about Starmer is that he’s the sort of politician whose current opinion on any given topic is most influenced by whoever he last spoke to. What’s less fun is that, because of this sort of soft-spined malleable identity Starmer has cultivated as a politician, he’s spent the last four odd years flipping and flopping and waffling as hard as he can on whether or not transgender Brits deserve legal protection and to be recognized as human beings.
Sort of a layup for anyone who’s not a disgusting Tory, you would think!
Back in late 2020, Starmer stated in no uncertain terms that Labour stood with the trans community, and that trans rights were human rights! Huzzah!
screenshot from Twitter.com
He spent the next few years campaigning for an update to the Gender Recognition Act that would streamline the process of allowing trans Brits to change their gender for legal purposes without extensive prerequisites like sexual reassignment surgery. Smeared as “Self ID” by a bunch of lying hyperbolic anti-trans activists, the Gender Recognition Act has become controversial because idiots think rapists will pause to do a bunch of paperwork before committing sexual crimes, and/or that their crimes will magically go unpunished if they do.
As a result, most of Starmer’s interviews between 2020 and 2023 inevitably concluded with some dickhead asking him if chicks can have dicks, if those chicks with dicks should be allowed in “single sex spaces,” and if the aforementioned bedicked chicks should participate in women’s sports. Typical stuff.
Regrettably, the decline: In 2021, a spokesperson for Starmer said that it’s chill for trans women to be excluded from some women’s spaces (which is already allowed in British law as long as there’s a legitimate reason), while refusing to clarify exactly what the fuck that means.
Then, in 2022, Starmer participated in a Q&A with insane transphobic nightmare forum Mumsnet, and inexplicably lauded the Cass review into Tavistock and Portman, England’s only destination for trans people seeking medical transition at the time, which was prompted chiefly by former Tavistock employee and anti-trans activist Susan Evans. The Cass review resulted in the closure of services at Tavistock, in favor of “regional hubs” that have yet to materialize, leaving gender dysphoric youth with no treatment at all. Great job, Cass!
By March of last year, Starmer was starting to back away from support for a reform of the GRA, and strategists for Labour began to suggest that support for trans rights would be a losing position for his upcoming bid to become Prime Minister… despite some mixed messaging from Labour.
By April, Starmer was conflating promoting trans rights with “rolling back women’s rights,” and the media is twisting his words to suggest that he believes one in one thousand women have a dick. Which is just really fucking funny.
Anywho, now that Starmer wants to be the UK’s PM, he’s very decidedly backed down from supporting trans folks. Big surprise. People have been critiquing his lack of decisive leadership on the issue for years now.
But they sure haven’t been suggesting he has a trans kid before now!
Apparently misspeaking in an interview, Starmer suggested that he has two boys, despite the fact that he has a son and a daughter. The Twitter account for the “Family Education Trust” immediately went absolutely nuts on what was obviously a verbal flub.
screenshot from Twitter.com
Trans Identified Child is an absolutely amazing twisting of a common transphobic term for trans women, “Trans Identified Males,” which you’ll see all over Twitter (formerly X) if you poke around the depraved rambling posts of any account that spends its whole day obsessing over trans people. Like Family Education Trust, in fact!
Starmer isn’t super public about his family. Though his wife occasionally appears with him in photographs, she isn’t a political entity herself, and they actively avoid naming their kids or having pictures taken with them in public.
But I dread to imagine a trans child who has to suffer a father who is so unconcerned with their civil liberties. Even worse, I can’t imagine living with a father who likes Margaret Thatcher. Absolutely horrific!
Anyway, with the Tories doing a sort of slow motion implosion and Starmer very likely to become the next Prime Minister once they get around to holding a general election, it would be really nice to hear that he’s started giving a shit about trans people again.
It seems unlikely to me that his daughter has abruptly decided to transition, or that Starmer would sneak his trans son’s new pronouns into a random interview if so, but if they have, I sure hope Keir remembers that things are pretty fucking rough for trans Brits right now, and gets his priorities straight so that he can actually help them if he wins the election.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.