Suella Braverman is right about trans

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Suella Braverman has confessed to a huge failure at the heart of the defeated Tory administration. Reflecting on the sorry state of the now-crushed UK Conservative Party, the former home secretary has acknowledged, in a speech in the US, that she had been ‘a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals’. She was referring, of course, to the scandal of the NHS’s Tavistock gender-identity clinic.

In a fiery speech delivered to the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC last night, Braverman said of the past few years of Tory rule: ‘[We claimed that] we were doing something about trans fanatics… What we did was let it happen.’

Perhaps surprisingly, she also admitted that, even as one of the most powerful politicians in the country, she was unable to have ‘LGBTQ+’ ‘Progress Pride’ flags removed from her Marsham Street offices. She described the display of the rainbow with a chevron in its side as signifying ‘occupied territory’, and ‘a horrible political campaign’. On this, she has the support of many same-sex attracted people, who also find the flag to be symbolic of an ideology that threatens hard-won gay rights.

Braverman’s no-nonsense words have been met with predictable howls of protest from the #BeKind brigade. ITV’s Paul Brand was clearly shaken by what he has described as ‘some of the most inflammatory language used by an MP about any LGBT issue since the 1980s’. Interestingly, the supposedly impartial Brand is a patron of trans lobby group Just Like Us, which has resisted government attempts to rid schools of gender ideology.

Braverman’s opponents in Labour have also competed to put the boot in. Stella Creasy, the MP for, er, Stella Creasy, has entreated the public to ‘stand up to this bile polluting our politics’.

Criticism has also come from within the Tory fold. Former Conservative candidate and LBC presenter Iain Dale has condemned what he calls ‘a disgusting speech’, adding:

‘And she seriously thinks she has a chance of leading the Conservative Party. Not while I have a breath left in my body. Moderate Conservatives need to stand up and be counted. This will not stand.’

Frankly, while Braverman’s language might have been harsh, so are the home truths she was seeking to highlight. The publication of the Cass Review earlier this year laid out the facts. For more than a decade, thousands of confused children were given experimental drugs on the NHS without any clear evidence of their benefit or follow-up on their harms. For many of them, this treatment will lead to sterility and lifelong health problems. For some, it will have led them to have their breasts or genitals surgically removed later in life – only for bitter regrets to set in.

Moreover, the experimental treatments doled out to so-called trans kids were adopted because of pressure from trans lobby groups, which, until recently, enjoyed a special relationship with respectable members of the British establishment.

Braverman’s wider point, that her party’s ineptitude in the face of trans zealots lost them votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, is also surely correct. Voters could see that despite the often bold rhetoric from former PM Rishi Sunak and some of his cabinet, most Tories were never really up for the fight against this pernicious ideology.

Braverman’s speech resonates with anger, as it should. What decent person could look at what has been done to children in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘equality’ without feeling a sense of fury? The handwringers who complain about her language ought to speak to detransitioners – the victims of this scandal, who were left sterile and with missing body parts at the hands of NHS doctors, therapists and surgeons.

It is the trans activists and their enablers who deserve the nation’s scorn – not Suella Braverman, who has simply dared to tell the truth.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.