Suella Braverman says she’s ‘repulsed’ by trans youth healthcare in disturbing anti-LGBTQ+ tirade
Suella Braverman launched an attack on LGBTQ+ activists at the National Conservatism Conference in the US. (Alex Wong/Getty)
Suella Braverman has launched a tirade against Pride flags and trans healthcare at a right-wing conference in the US.
The MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, in Hampshire – who held her seat despite Labour’s landslide victory in last week’s general election – appeared at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, advertised as a gathering of people who “are inextricably tied to the idea of nation” and “see national conservatism as the best path forward”.
During her speech, the former home secretary ranted about the trans-inclusive Progress Pride flag and gender-affirming care for trans youth, describing the latter as “mutilation” – despite the fact gender-affirming surgeries are only performed on adults on the NHS in the UK.
“We Tory ministers, nominally in charge of the system, completely failed,” she said. “The progress flag flew over our buildings as if they were occupied territory. I asked, as a minister: ‘Why is this happening, who says that it has to’, and could get no answer.
“I couldn’t even get the flag of a horrible political campaign I disagreed with taken down from the roof of the government department I was supposed to be in charge of.”
Braverman, whose controversial Rwanda scheme for people crossing the Channel between France and England, was “dead and buried” on the first day of Keir Starmer’s premiership, then launched into a vitriolic attack on gender-affirming care for trans youngsters.
“The progress flag says one monstrous, thing to me: that I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals. We Tories, right through our smoking ruin of a general election campaign, claimed that we were doing something about trans fanatics, when in fact what we did was let it happen.
“I am too physically repulsed to go into what ‘it’ is. But it is something that the true grown-ups in any civilised society should never have allowed to happen to their or anyone else’s children.”
Braverman added she was a Tory who “didn’t turn a blind eye to this, who [wasn’t] somehow tricked by monsters seeking to mutilate children”.
LBC broadcaster and former Conservative parliamentary hopeful Iain Dale wrote on social media: “What a disgusting speech. And she seriously thinks she has a chance of leading the Conservative Party. Not while I have a breath left in my body.
“Moderate Conservatives need to stand up and be counted. This will not stand.”
Meanwhile, Labour MP Stella Creasy said: “Everyone has to stand up to this bile polluting our politics [because] equality benefits and liberates us all.” And former Conservative prime minister Theresa May warned Tories about being seen as the nasty party.
Political commentator and Guardian columnist Owen Jones wrote: “Suella Braverman launches her Tory leadership bid as you’d expect: with hate. The Tories were already transforming into an openly hard-right party. She wants to finish the job.”
Former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw, who stood down at the general election after 27 years as a Labour MP, said: “Suella Braverman reveals the true face of the Tory right with her bitter fury about LGBT people. We exist. Get over it,” The Independent reported.
This is not the first time Braverman has spoken at a National Conservatism event. Last year, she appeared at the London conference alongside fellow Tory MPs Danny Kruger, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Miriam Cates.
Braverman made an anti-trans joke about Labour leader Keir Starmer, while Kruger claimed that heterosexual marriage was the “only possible basis for a safe and successful society”, and Cates said no “musings or… policies would amount to anything long-lasting… unless the “over-arching threat to… Western society” was addressed: an apparent shortage of babies in the UK.
Rees-Mogg and Cates lost their seats at general election while Kruger won the new constituency of East Wiltshire.
