Anti-LGBTQ+ violence intensified in 2023 – and the government only made things worse
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When Rishi Sunak walked out on stage at the Conservative Party conference in October, there was already a quiet sense of unease among many queer people. For any party leader, a conference speech presents an opportunity to appeal to your base while strengthening support among MPs and party members – but for Sunak, the stakes were even higher. Support for his party was in free fall, so his speech would have to make a splash.
And make a splash he did. Instead of offering concrete solutions to everyday issues faced by the public, Rishi Sunak used his time on stage to punch down on trans women once again.
“A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense,” he said, before suggesting that people were being “bullied” into believing that “people can be any sex they want to be”.
Sunak’s speech hardly came out of left field – if anything, it was the culmination of months of degrading comments and cruel jibes. Even so, there was a sense afterwards that things had tipped irrevocably over the edge – that anti-trans hate had become such a mainstream part of political discourse that the road back to common sense appeared increasingly impassable.
To say 2023 has been a difficult year for LGBTQ+ people in the UK would be an understatement. There have been moments of queer joy, protest and resilience, but there have also been incidents of shocking violence and aggression – and politicians have repeatedly made it worse, choosing to fan the flames of a culture war that threatens to engulf our hard-won rights.
Just a few short weeks into 2023, a chilling sense of unease swept through queer communities as news broke that a schoolgirl had been stabbed to death in broad daylight in a park.
That girl’s name was Brianna Ghey – she was a 16-year-old trans girl whose parents later described as a “larger than life character who would leave a lasting impression on all that met her”.
Brianna should have had her whole life ahead of her, but it was taken from her in a senseless act of violence. For trans people, Brianna’s death became symbolic of the broader climate they were living in. Vigils were held across the UK, and queer people publicly and privately grieved for a teenager they could see parts of themselves in.
Even in the wake of such a senseless tragedy, nothing changed, and violence against LGBTQ+ people in the UK continued to worsen. Just months later, Clapham – one of London’s queerest districts – was left shaken when two people were stabbed in the smoking area of The Two Brewers, a popular gay bar.
Such an incident would have been brutal had it happened anywhere, but for many queer people, having two of their own attacked in one of their safe spaces left them with a gnawing sense of unease.
The Two Brewers stabbing was far from an isolated incident. Throughout 2023, social media was flooded with anecdotal stories of violence and aggression towards queer people. We heard from those who were attacked in public, or those who had slurs hurled at them, all because they dared to be visibly queer.
That’s backed up by the statistics. In October, UK government data showed that hate crimes overall had decreased by five per cent from the previous year – yet transphobic hate crimes in England and Wales were up by 11 per cent, with 4,732 incidents recorded.
Even in the face of heightened aggression and violence, the government has done nothing beyond whipping up fear and hate. When Sunak stood up on stage at the Tory party conference, he was solidifying a position he had been repeating for months – that the sex a person is assigned at birth is immutable.
Instead of working to bring the temperature down in an increasingly heated culture war, Sunak repeatedly fell back on the same old talking points. He spent 2023 talking about whether or not a woman can have a penis, how many genders there are, and mocking trans women in private party meetings.
Sunak was far from alone – he has been joined on the frontlines of anti-trans discourse by some of the Conservative Party’s most prominent figures of the right, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch.
During her stint as home secretary, Braverman ruthlessly repeated anti-trans talking points, insisting that trans women “have no place” in women’s hospital wards, while Badenoch – who is women and equalities minister – has apparently refused to outlaw conversion therapy because of her own personal belief in a conspiracy theory that gay people are transitioning so they can become straight.
The rhetoric has been relentless – and it’s not even just the Tories. Labour has also increasingly become embroiled in toxic rows that can be easily boiled down to biological essentialism. Keir Starmer, apparently in an effort to court conservative voters, felt the need to clarify that a woman is an “
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