A Tory MP – yes, an actual elected politician – just compared healthcare for vulnerable trans kids to Alice in Wonderland
Danny Kruger, Conservative MP for Devizes, on January 26, 2020 in London, England. (Ollie Millington/Getty Images)
The Conservative MP for Devizes, Danny Kruger, has compared the NHS gender clinic for trans youth to “Wonderland” – and that’s not, in his eyes, a favourable comparison.
Writing for Conservative Home, Kruger – the son of Great British Bake Off’s Prue Leith – said that “sex is the business of the state”.
Parroting right-wing evangelicals, he continued: “The distinction between maleness and femaleness, the essential qualities written into our biology, is a fundamental building block of society.
“For someone to cross the border between the two, formally to assume the legal status and the rights of the opposite sex, is a big deal, properly requiring the permission of government.”
Excuse us while we yawn. A Conservative, implicitly arguing that capitalism depends on families consisting of one man, one woman, and producing workers? A revelation, truly.
Kruger, whose piece was aimed at Tory equalities chief Liz Truss and urged her to “confirm the status quo” when she publishes the results of the 2018 public consultation on modernising the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) – misunderstanding, perhaps, that Truss cannot control what the public said in the consultation – went on to say that “birth sex” should be used to determine who can access which public single-sex spaces.
“Birth sex”, not gender, is also what Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán considers to be of the utmost importance – he emphasised as such right before he signed a bill that legally erases trans people and blocked another bill that would have tackled violence against women.
Orbán said that the bill aimed at tackling violence against women promoted “destructive gender ideologies”. Sound familiar, at all?
Read our open letter to Boris Johnson here.
Danny Kruger went on to add: "To concede the claims of the extreme trans lobby – that sex is simply 'assigned' at birth – is to sell the pass. We will be in Wonderland, or in 1984, where truth is what the people in charge decide it is.
"We are arguably already there. Lewis Carroll described a child perplexed by the antics of grownups living in an alternative reality. The Tavistock NHS Clinic, where children are told they can be the sex they want to be and given puberty-blocking hormone treatments, is our Wonderland."
Seeing transgender people – who belong to a vulnerable minority group that makes up around one per cent of the population – described as "extreme" by a sitting MP should shock and anger. It doesn't, mostly because the tone of the "debate" on trans people in the UK has already passed the point at which that would have been a nasty surprise.
Comparing NHS healthcare for trans youth – labelled the most "cautious and painstaking" in the world by experts – to a fictional, acid-trip-inspired world follows on from a long line of commentary about trans people in the UK that positions a marginalised community as "gender extremists".
But it is when a white, straight, cisgender man decides his feelings about family and biology are more important than transgender people – including when those feelings put him on the same side of a "debate" as fascist far-right dictators – that the real extremism shows.
PinkNews has contacted Danny Kruger for comment.
