Streeting is lying to trans kids in Pink News

Pink News have run an article penned by Labour’s Wes Streeting. The health secretary ostensibly addressed young people who are worried about the fact that his party has gutted both health and social support for trans people.

Pink News describes itself as the “world’s largest and most influential LGBTQ+ led media brand”. Of course, to anyone who has followed Pink News‘ rapidly falling quality of content and shift towards a “reporter free newsroom” will be unsurprised that it’s scraping the barrel for articles now.

However, even for the Daily-Mail-but-Pink, platforming a transphobe like Streeting is lower than low. This is a man who lied through his teeth about the number of trans kids who took their own lives because of the puberty blocker ban. Worse still, he called reporting on those statistics “dangerous”.

And now we’re meant to listen to him lying through his teeth about caring?

Streeting – ‘about you, rather than to you’

The health secretary begins his article by stating that:

If you are a young person questioning your gender, or a parent watching your child struggle with who they are, this moment of reassessing how NHS gender services are accessed and deployed may feel frightening.

You might be worried about what comes next. You might feel uncertain, unheard, or invisible in a debate that too often talks about you, rather than to you.

So let me begin here: you matter. Your feelings are real. And you deserve care, dignity and understanding.

Not once, in this entire piece, does Streeting refer to the trans kids he’s talking to as ‘trans kids’. He calls them young people “questioning” their gender.

He says [trans kids] deserve dignity, but he won’t even acknowledge their identity. The closest he manages is “every trans person, every child deserves to feel safe”.

‘I remember what it felt like’

This refusal of acknowledgement makes his subsequent speech about his own sexuality particularly two-faced:

I know, from my own life, how powerful and sometimes overwhelming questions of identity can be.

Growing up gay, I remember what it felt like to wonder if I would be accepted, whether I would be safe, and whether the world would make space for me as I was.

Streeting grew up gay, fearing that he wouldn’t be accepted. I wonder if he is capable of the empathy to imagine himself in trans kids’ place now?

To the trans kids who have had their medication pathways ripped away from them on blatantly ideological grounds, Streeting isn’t showing the “love, acceptance and support” of his “amazing family and friends”.

To those trans kids he calls “questioning”, is Streeting meaningfully different from the politicians who talked about gay people as “a pretended family relationship” when he was growing up?

Is his government’s guidance urging a “very careful approach” when a child “asks” to socially transition in schools closer to championing LGBTQ+ rights, or to Section 28’s ban on teaching materials that “intentionally promote homosexuality”?

‘Support is not on hold’

Streeting goes on to talk about the pause on the PATHWAYS puberty blocker trial for a review of “aspects of its design and safety”. Of course, he fails to mention that the review was proposed by a man who happened to be recused due to his openly transphobic social media posting immediately afterwards.

The health secretary also states that:

At the same time, there is a proposal to stop routinely offering puberty blockers and hormone treatments to under-18s while more evidence is gathered about long-term effects.

A masterclass in the use of the passive voice there. Likewise, Streeting also masterfully neglected to mention that the proposal was based on a study that used a bizarre set of inclusion criteria that just happened to rule out almost all positive evidence for said treatments. Funny that, isn’t it?

In spite of these pauses and halts on treatment, the health secretary nevertheless tries to insist that:

Support is not on hold.

Young people referred to services are being seen by mental health and paediatric teams, with help available while you wait for specialist care.

Advertisement

What use is mental health care to the trans boy who is being forced to undergo puberty because of his government’s transphobic ideology? Counseling doesn’t stop his hips from widening or his chest from growing.

What use is mental health care to the trans girl whose voice breaks because the blocker trial is on hold? Every time she speaks in a tenor from now on, as the dysphoria bites, she’ll know whose fault that is. Will she take solace in the fact that some sniveling prick of a health secretary said her feelings are valid?

‘Questioning the government’s commitment’

At the end of his marathon of hypocrisy, omissions, and outright lies, Streeting widens his address:

I also want to speak to the wider LGBTQ+ community, and to anyone questioning the government’s commitment.

I hear those concerns. I understand why trust feels fragile right now.

Advertisement

But let me say this clearly: every trans person, every child deserves to feel safe, respected, and included in our society and in the health system that serves them. That is not up for debate.

There will be disagreements of course. This is a deeply complex area, and people come to it with different perspectives and experiences.

People are questioning this government’s commitment because, among many other reasons, every LGBTQ+ individual in the country watched the prime minister go from saying ‘trans women are women’ to saying the exact opposite, overnight.

We’re questioning your commitment because we watched you, Wes Streeting, call for the segregation of trans people. We watched you lie about the suicides caused by policies that you inherited and endorsed.

Social murder

There’s something uniquely loathsome about the sucking moral vacuum in the shape of a man that is Wesley Paul William Streeting.

There’s a level of open lying in his dealing that speaks to his utter contempt for other people. This is a health secretary who claims to hate NHS privatisation. However, he takes tens of thousands in donations from the private providers his party is selling the service to.

Likewise, this is a health secretary who tries to tell the public to hate the doctors for striking. Meanwhile, he bleats to the doctors that they should undermine their union. And, of course, who could forget his taking a massive MPs’ pay rise whilst threatening to rip training positions away from doctors?

Streeting is a politician who uses being gay as part of his justification for the blatantly transphobic things he does. And yes, calling for trans segregation and removing our healthcare is transphobic, even if Pink News platforms his claims to care.

In sociology and political theory, the concept of ‘social murder’ refers to an unnatural death caused by the structure of society itself, and by the politicians that help shape that structure.

There’s a part of me that wonders if Streeting is ever kept awake at night by the thought of the kids who died at his far-removed hand. I doubt it.

Featured image via the Canary