Trans rights and Rishis’ wrongs


By Jeanie Purslow- November 2023

Nice to meet u, reader. My name is Jeanie and I’m a 24-year-old musician and writer born and raised in London. I currently live in Lewisham, and have recently found myself narked and unemployed in equal measure – that’s a lot – as I try to navigate life as a three-year-ago graduate, desperately frustrated by the world and mostly unable to change it. I’m also non-binary, which I wish didn’t really matter, but in context of this article it probably will. IDONTWANNAMESSTHISUP called out asking for writers, and I have a lot to talk about. I like to analyse political trends through a Marxist lens, breaking down the economic turmoil behind the political football kicked in the direction of the general public in times of crisis. So this article is about the Conservative government’s recent transphobic policy amendment, disallowing trans women from womens’ hospital wards, and why as a completely irrelevant attack on a minority group it is a deflection tactic from the real issue at hand – the fall of the NHS.

Despite declaring cutting waiting lists as one of his priorities for 2023, Rishi Sunak has no real answers for the staggering 7.68 million people waiting for treatment on the NHS. This figure was released by NHS England in July of this year, meaning in 9 years of Tory corruption the already large 3 million figure reported in 2014 has more than doubled. In what has been a very active last couple of years for strike and union action in sectors such as mail and rail, the NHS union UNISON has also made courageous attempts to draw attention to the crisis within the National Health Service and extreme pressure on its staff. As a socialist and union fanatic, my feelings about this surge in unionisation are mostly those of joy; how inspiring to see workers come together to acknowledge their collective strength and attempt to enter in talks with bosses. How exciting to see workers achieve success in their endeavours, to see leaders like Mick Lynch of
the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union gain recognition and power in his fight for workers’ liberation and rights. But other feelings surface for me, too – feelings of shame that something as precious and crucial as the NHS is so desperate for help that doctors and nurses already struggling to make ends meet are forced to put their patients on the line to draw attention to the cause. Then I reflect, and remember that it’s not them putting their patients on the line, but the decade of Tory austerity and neglect. July 2022 analysis by the NHS Confederation found that the Health Service is facing a “real-terms cut in funding of between £4 billion and £9.4 billion.” Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation simply stated “the government has placed the NHS in an impossible position,” explaining that “we have been calling for the government to help NHS and social care staff with the cost-of-living crisis by increasing their pay, but what we did not expect was that these extra costs would have to come
from within the current health budget.”

Picsabay, via Pexels

This information is the tip of the iceberg. It is not the lived experience of people, ill people, concerned, worried and stressed everyday workers and citizens. But it helps us to begin to make sense of these experiences, to uncover what the actual cause of the ruin might be. Sometimes things feel too overwhelming to really attempt to understand, especially if you yourself are one of these people waiting for care. Transgender people make up a proportionally large percentage of these in context of their population ratio. In 2018, Onkar Sahota of Labour asked the Mayor of London at MQT (Mayor’s Question Time) what was to be done about the fact that reportedly trans and gender non-conforming people are waiting an average of 50 weeks (the target was 18) to be seen for an initial appointment by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust Gender Identity Clinic. Sadiq Khan replied, “in my view this reflects the urgent need to plan for and fund the health service properly at a national level – and we need to hold them to account for it.” What does this mean?

At the time of this inquiry, Theresa May was Prime Minister of the UK. She proposed raising the general public’s taxes to allow for a £20bn boost in NHS funding by 2023-24. Yet since this declaration, we have witnessed the numbers of people waiting for NHS care rise to 7.68 million as the cost of living crisis takes a firm hold on the lives of ordinary people – and need I remind you that it is not ordinary people who are making or suffering the consequences of governance.
Rishi Sunak and his heiress wife Akshata Murty have a joint net worth of £730 million, roughly twice as much as King Charles’ estimated fortune. How would owners of such exorbitant wealth have any idea what it feels like to live on the fringes of society? How would a totally cishet (cisgender and heterosexual) Conservative cabinet, including Steve Barclay, who announced plans alongside Suella Braverman to ban trans people from single-sex wards have any inclination or desire to uplift and support transgender people? The short answer is they wouldn’t.

The bleak reality is that the Conservatives act in their best interests, making deals for the benefit of their kind – the rich. If it does not affect them, they have the power and financial stability to ignore it, or, in this case of baseless transphobic rhetoric, employ it. There is reason behind the seemingly pointless declaration of trans exclusion, and it isn’t to protect cisgender women. It is
to alienate the LGBTQ+ cause, to divide the public, to gain support from the concerned and/or ignorant right-wing public, and ultimately deflect from their economic failures. The NHS lies in tatters at Sunak’s feet. Nurses strike, people on waiting lists grow weaker, more isolated and in some cases die. Protests rage in the streets. Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law makes a billion-dollar deal with BP. Life goes on. But not for us.

Sources:

1)https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/14/record-number-people-waiting-start-routine-
nhs-hospital-treatment-england#:~:text=Figures%20from%20NHS%20England%20show,and%2
07%20million%20in%202022.
2)https://www.nhsconfed.org/news/nhs-leaders-facing-real-terms-cut-funding-and-impossible-ch
oices-over-which-areas-patient-care
3)https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-
answer/nhs-waiting-times-transgender-people#_ftn1
4)https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/16/may-to-unveil-20-billion-pound-a-year-nhs-b
oost
5)https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/13/rishi-sunak-cabinet-reshuffle-david-cameron-lgbtq-ri
ghts/
1)https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/14/record-number-people-waiting-start-routine-
nhs-hospital-treatment-england#:~:text=Figures%20from%20NHS%20England%20show,and%2
07%20million%20in%202022.
2)https://www.nhsconfed.org/news/nhs-leaders-facing-real-terms-cut-funding-and-impossible-ch
oices-over-which-areas-patient-care
3)https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-
answer/nhs-waiting-times-transgender-people#_ftn1
4)https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/16/may-to-unveil-20-billion-pound-a-year-nhs-b
oost
5)https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/13/rishi-sunak-cabinet-reshuffle-david-cameron-lgbtq-ri
ghts/

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