British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Photo via Sunak’s Facebook.
Britain’s leading LGBTQ media outlet, PinkNewsUK, reported Sunday that it had obtained a recent video in which British Prime Minster Rishi Sunak is clearly heard mocking transgender women.
The leaked video, shared exclusively with PinkNewsUK, is from a gathering of the 1922 Committee — a group of all Conservative lawmakers that meets weekly when Parliament is in session — on June 5, 2023.
According to PinkNewsUK:
“PinkNews has seen an exclusive photograph from the event, and it is estimated that up to a hundred MPs were in attendance, including notable Tories such as 1922 Committee chair, Sir Graham Brady, and Veteran’s Affairs Minister Johnny Mercer. Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering, and Desmond Swain, MP for New Forest West, were also at the gathering.
Sunak’s address and his choice of humor, which dehumanizes and ‘others’ trans women and is met with raucous laughter from Tory MPs, suggests that the PM is keen to maintain his anti-trans stance when speaking to colleagues without the media being present.”
The prime minster makes reference to an opposition leader, although that person is not clearly identified. PinkNewsUK noted that the prime minster then took aim at Sir Edward Jonathan Davey, a British politician who has served as leader of the Liberal Democrats since 2020.
“Over the same period of time, you might have noticed Ed Davey has been very busy,” Sunak says.
“Like me, you can probably see that he was trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises.”
“You’ll all know that I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths to 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology,” the prime minister added.
The person who shared the video with PinkNews said: “The veneer of freedom of speech publicly is one thing but to make jokes in private, it’s another thing altogether.”
“You wouldn’t make jokes about other marginalized people the way he did about trans people.”
They added: “There was laughter, there were quite a few younger attendees who looked visibly uncomfortable.”
Sunak’s mention of “biology” and the use of trans women as a punchline appears to demonstrate the prime minister’s willingness to adopt so-called gender-critical lines and attack the trans community when addressing his own MPs in private PinkNewsUK noted.
Trans rights are under attack in the U.K.
Five months ago Sunak blocked Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill from being signed into law by King Charles III. Additionally Sunak has also made clear that he plans to re-write the Equality Act to bar trans women from single-sex spaces including changing rooms and sporting competitions.
PinkNewsUK has reached out to Sunak for comment.
The National LGBT Media Association represents 13 legacy publications in major markets across the country with a collective readership of more than 400K in print and more than 1 million + online. Learn more here: NationalLGBTMediaAssociation.com
