UK's Labour Party Abandoned Trans People. Here's What American Dems Can Learn.

Democrats: There is no “middle ground” on equal rights. Take it from UK Labour.

Left: Keir Starmer // Number 10 // Creative Commons. Right: Gavin Newsom // Gage Skidmore // Creative Commons

When Councillor Georgia Meadows of Witney, a suburb outside of Oxford, ran for a leadership position within LGBT+ Labour—a partisan organization similar to the Democratic or Republican clubs here in the United States—she would have never predicted the outcome: cancelled, because she and other candidates were transgender.

Plane tickets had been paid for; a slate of candidates had been organized; eager party upstarts had been campaigning for months. But that April, the United Kingdom’s top court ruled that trans women were not, legally speaking, women.

Yet, it wasn’t until the week of the organization’s Annual General Meeting—where it would be putting new leadership up to a vote—that LGBT+ Labour announced it couldn’t hold an election, because some of the popular candidates were trans women and running for positions reserved for women.

“Following the recent Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010, the legal guidance surrounding the implications remains unclear,” an email blast sent out by LGBT+ Labour, and obtained by the news outlet LabourList, reads. “After careful consideration, we have concluded that proceeding with the AGM carries too great a risk of legal action under the current uncertainty.”

Meadows, who was running for co-chair, doesn’t buy it. “The current committee decided to cancel the election because they were going to lose it,” she tells Erin in the Morning. Other Labour members at the time chimed in to agree; the last-minute cancellation, months after the Supreme Court judgement, raised eyebrows.

The Labour Party is widely seen as the United Kingdom’s approximate counterpart to the Democrats: mainstream, branded as center-left, and the self-proclaimed antidote to conservatism. Now, it seems both parties have reversed course on promises to transgender voters, capitulated to far-right talking points, and traded human rights for fleeting political clout. Politicos from the U.K. say Labour’s disastrous post-election fallout ought to serve as a cautionary tale for American Democrats, lest they be doomed to repeat it.

Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer ushered in historic victories for the Party in 2024. After stating firmly that “trans women are women” in 2022 during his tenure as a Member of Parliament (MP), he recanted the sentiment in 2025. When reporters at The Independent asked for further clarification, a Starmer spokesperson doubled down, saying that Starmer believes trans women should use men’s restrooms, and trans men should use women’s restrooms. This mirrors statements from the other high-ranking Labour officials, who have come out in support of trans-exclusionary health care policies and endorsed a so-called “gender critical” (aka anti-trans) activist to steer the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Meanwhile, California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, recently gave airtime to anti-trans conspiracy theorists and rhetoric, and allegedly killed pro-LGBTQ legislation behind the scenes. Seventeen Democrats in Congress crossed party lines to advance a defense bill with anti-trans provisions. And New Hampshire, which once made history for enacting LGBTQ protections with bipartisan support, saw a dozen state Democrats vote in favor of a law restricting health care for transgender youth. These self-fashioned centrists and others urge the broader Democratic Party to adopt a “moderate” approach to human rights for trans people as an electoral strategy moving forward.

This mutual fervor is no coincidence. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group, has poured millions of American dollars into anti-trans litigation in the U.K., moving the needle to the right, which has become a testing ground for just how far this rhetoric can go.

“They just keep bringing court cases over and over,” says jane fae (stylized sans capitalization), a director of TransActual UK and the chair of Trans Media Watch. “If you have almost unlimited people, you just keep bringing cases. No matter how ridiculous.” This tactic is a well-known ADF maneuver.

In turn, British inventions like the infamously pseudoscientific “Cass Review” are regurgitated back into American political discourse. This project, spearheaded by someone with no clinical experience treating gender dysphoria, has been cited in the U.S. by federal agencies, in landmark legal battles, and by lawmakers across the country in order to justify discrimination against the trans community.

A pervasive, misleading narrative has formed on both sides of the Atlantic: trans people, who still face disproportionate rates of violence, poverty and discrimination, have gone “too far” in demands for basic civil rights. Some argue that the only way to win over the electorate is to throw trans voters under the bus; that the majority of voters have been scared off by the mainstream left’s (often half-hearted) embrace of transgender people.

“I’m not comfortable with the, ‘Let’s just let’s throw trans rights overboard,’” said Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and podcaster, during a 2024 post-election analysis. “But I think that what you normally do in a movement like this is you decide which things you’re going to fight for and which things you’re maybe not ready to have a fight over—or maybe haven’t even decided what the position should be on.”

As other factions of the left begin to absorb these talking points, trans people, their families, and allies are defecting from the party to more progressive alternatives, like the U.K. Green Party or the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, hardline Conservatives are pivoting to the Reform Party, an even more rabidly xenophobic and anti-trans group, and American Republicans are even more open and successful about pushing extremist anti-trans hate.

But now Labour, whose 2024 landslide victory unseated the scandal-ridden Conservative stronghold, is suffering from record-breaking lows in approval ratings. Its rightward encroachment may be a last-ditch attempt to court voters, but on-the-ground campaigners tell Erin in the Morning that compromising on human rights is a bad strategy for a supposedly liberal party, plain and simple.

“You’re not going to vote for Labour when you can vote for Reform,” Charley Hasted, chair of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, says of right-wingers being chased by the Labour Party. “They are also hemorrhaging votes from people who support LGBT people.”

Dylan Tippetts, elected as a local Labour official near the southern tip of England, was one of the party’s few openly trans representatives until just a few months ago. He resigned and joined the Liberal Democrats, lamenting that Labour “has thrown transgender people under the bus and has taken us backwards decades.”

“I cannot continue to represent a party that does not support my fundamental rights,” he said in a social media statement.

But the United Kingdom wasn’t always known as “TERF Island.” In fact, in 2017, the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May was among those ushering in trans-friendly laws. She denounced calling transness a “mental illness” and called on the government to “streamline and de-medicalise” the legal transition process.

Now, such openness from the Conservatives is unthinkable, and progress within Labour has come to a screeching halt.

“We won a massive majority, but it doesn’t feel like it,” Councillor Meadows says. Despite other trans voters who defected from Labour, Meadows has continued to fight for change within, serving as LGBT+ Labour’s national Trans Officer.

But these days, even getting the committee to issue a statement can be like pulling teeth, she says, as the supposedly trans-friendly party warps into something more closely resembling those they claimed to have beaten. And with approval ratings in the gutter, the lesson for Democrats has become clear. Any capitulation on human rights for trans people is just treading water—a temporary, short-term distraction, one that won’t pay off in the long run. It’s a gambit that only serves to prop up hateful policies while leaving the wider voter base demoralized and disillusioned.

“Labour is literally trying to replace [Conservatives], ideologically, and get those voters,” Meadows says, a shift that can also be seen in other social debates, such as with increasingly hostile rhetoric about immigrants and other minority groups. Meanwhile, critical issues like the housing crisis and health care access compound.

“It’s an ideological sleight of hand,” Meadows says. “We blame these groups so it feels like issues are solved—but they aren’t.”