Keir Starmer // Flickr // Simon Dawson
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This morning, Americans woke up to news from the United Kingdom: Keir Starmer, beleaguered leader of a collapsing Labour Party, announced his resignation after a mutiny from within his own ranks. Starmer served just under two years after winning a landslide in 2024 that ended years of Conservative rule. During that time, he was subject to the same forces we see in Democratic politics today: calls to moderate on transgender people and to trade a vulnerable community for political survival. He listened—and transgender people suffered more under his Labour government than they did under the Conservatives, with puberty blockers banned, a nationwide bathroom ban attempt, and the country reclassified alongside Hungary and Russia for its treatment of trans people. It did not work. His party—which won 411 seats two years ago—now polls at 19%. Democrats should learn from this before they make the same mistake.
In 2024, Starmer’s landslide election brought hope that the abuses of 14 years of Conservative governance would finally end. Instead, Starmer and Labour fell under pressure to throw transgender people under the bus—and they did. The Cass Review, published in April 2024 under the Conservatives, was condemned for its use of hate group advisors and bad science. Labour embraced the Cass Review wholeheartedly anyway, and used it to justify a systematic shutdown of transgender youth care. The Conservatives’ emergency ban on puberty blockers was made permanent. The NHS stopped issuing new hormone prescriptions to trans youth. The government then turned its attention to private gender clinics, the last resort for desperate families, restricting their ability to operate. Trans youth in the United Kingdom now face some of the most restrictive policies in the Western world, with virtually no pathway to care—a reality that rivals the restrictions imposed by governments the UK once condemned.
It did not stop with transgender youth. In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act means assigned sex at birth only—stripping trans people of legal recognition of their gender. Starmer celebrated it, calling it “much-needed clarity” and declaring "a woman is an adult female.” The government’s equality watchdog followed by declaring trans women “biological men” and issuing guidance excluding them from single-sex spaces. Starmer then urged public institutions to bar trans people from restrooms and other facilities “as soon as possible.” Universities, hospitals, Parliament, and sporting bodies complied. ILGA-Europe reclassified the United Kingdom alongside Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Russia for having “no functioning legal or administrative process for legal gender recognition.”
And what did any of this do for Starmer and Labour? Nothing. As the party’s numbers cratered, Labour kept slamming the transphobia button harder, as if one more concession would stop the bleeding. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary who made the puberty blocker ban permanent, publicly said he regretted ever saying “trans women are women.” Even Burnham, Starmer’s likely successor who once defended trans women’s right to use women’s facilities, reversed himself to court right-wing voters. None of it worked. Labour lost 1,500 council seats and the party is facing an absolute collapse. All that remains is a party that has embraced transphobia and betrayed its allies while riding a sinking ship to the bottom of the ocean.
I often write about Democrats here in the United States, and I often criticize them for taking stances that capitulate to far-right framings on transgender people. In recent months, I lambasted eight House Democrats for voting to hand Trump more power to pull funding from schools that support transgender students. I slammed Gavin Newsom and Xavier Becerra for their retreat on transgender sports and, in Newsom’s case, for floating the idea that trans people should wait until 25 to transition—a position with its roots in UK-based anti-trans activism. I’ve even criticized progressive icon and Mayor Mamdani for limiting his new clinic to patients 19 and older, using Trump’s executive order age cutoff in what amounts to a retreat from his promises to use every tool at his disposal to fight for trans youth. Many have wondered why I have just as many sharp words for Democrats who retreat as I do for the Republicans driving the attacks. Starmer’s resignation today should help explain why.
One of my biggest fears is not the Republican Party. They are the devil we know—terrible, and they will take every step to target trans people in the worst ways imaginable. But in the United States, we have one thing the UK no longer does: our major left-of-center party has not abandoned us. At least here, the harm can still be reversed. Executive orders can be revoked. Rules can be rewritten. Democratic-held states can serve as islands of refuge and support for transgender people, and a future Democratic administration can undo what this one has done. That is only true so long as the Democratic Party remains willing to fight for us. What happens if the only alternative party in the United States follows Labour’s path and embraces transphobia too? Where does that leave transgender people?
The greatest danger to transgender people in America is not another two years of Republican rule. It is the potential for a cancer to grow inside the Democratic Party—one that whispers to its leaders that the vulnerable and “unpopular” can be thrown to the wolves in exchange for survival. But what the pundits pushing this strategy never tell those leaders is that there will never be enough to feed those wolves. There is no amount of concession on trans rights that will satisfy the other side. The ads will still come. And they will not stop at trans people… immigrants… disabled people… LGB people. One by one, each group will become the next “strategic sacrifice,” until you are left with a party that has abandoned every community that once believed in it—all in pursuit of a political center that doesn’t even exist. You sell your soul, and all you have left are empty platitudes and a collapsing future.
So yes, today, Democrats should watch Keir Starmer and think about what led to this moment. They should think about him standing outside Downing Street this morning with nothing to show for it. They must avoid making his same mistake. Because if they do, transgender people will be lost for a generation politically—and it will have all been for nothing.
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