Meanwhile, many members of the trans community feel that they have been abandoned by Ms Mordaunt, who went from defending them inside and outside Parliament, to making jokes about “women with / without will”. An LGBT activist said, “Now I prefer the other candidates because they at least adhere to what they believe and what they have said.”
Ms. Mordaunt’s credentials as an LGBT ally are well documented. In August 2017, the Royal Navy reservist, who was then a junior minister in the Department of Labor and Pensions, wrote to then-President Donald Trump urging him to reverse his ban on transgender people serving in the United States Army.
In 2018, when she was Minister of Women and Equality under Theresa May, she took a demedicalized stance in the debate when she presented the Government’s consultation on proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to the Commons.
That same year, he delivered a passionate speech to MPs saying transgender people faced “discrimination and bigotry”. [that] it’s very similar to what gay men faced in the 1980s. “
“None of us were in politics at the time, but if we did, would we have defended this community? I hope we had it, ”he said.
However, rivals have noted that his tune seems to have changed.
In the first televised debate on Friday, she said, “I’m a woman, I’m a biological woman in every cell of my body,” adding that a man who had made a legal transition “wasn’t the same as me.” .
Meanwhile, rival candidates Kemi Badenoch, a former equality minister, and Liz Truss, a foreign minister who also has responsibility for equality issues, said Ms Mordaunt had backed a push for self-identification by to those who want to make the transition, and who together had reversed. politics.
Ms Mordaunt disputed the allegations, saying that although she had ordered a GRA review, she was not in favor of self-identification and “would not have divorced him from healthcare”.