Pride Month

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) on securing this important debate, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) for his personal and powerful testimony. I thank all those who have contributed this afternoon.

I welcome this debate and the opportunity to wish people a very happy Pride Month, and send my solidarity to LGBT+ communities in Liverpool, Riverside, and across the country. Although this debate is an opportunity to celebrate and take pride in the existence, struggles and successes of those communities, we must also recognise the violence and oppression that LGBT+ people still suffer. Just last month, hundreds of people marched through Liverpool city centre to protest against a spate of vicious homophobic attacks on our streets in the past few weeks. I pledge my solidarity with the victims of those appalling attacks, which were especially horrific because they happened during Pride Month. I call for justice to be swiftly served, and action taken to ensure that all our communities feel safe on our streets.

The diversity of Liverpool is one of our greatest strengths, and those attacks show that we must do more to ensure that everyone is welcome on our streets, and that violence, hatred and bigotry are not. Although responsibility for the attacks must be borne by the perpetrators, and justice must be served, they did not happen in a vacuum. This year, the Government have waged a culture war against trans rights, attacking leading LGBT organisations such as Stonewall, for its campaigning on trans rights. They have disbanded their own LGBT+ advisory panel after a series of resignations over the delay in banning conversion therapy practices.

Despite promising a ban on conversion therapies three years ago, the Government have yet to take action. Instead, they have kicked the can down the road into yet another consultation. Soundings from the Prime Minister, and others, threaten significant loopholes, notably regarding faith-based practices, as well as trans people. We know from the Government’s own national LGBT+ survey that 51% of those who have undergone conversion therapy said that it had been conducted by faith groups. I am a member of the Women and Equalities Committee, which is currently conducting a review of the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. Time and again I have heard evidence of the harrowing impact of those practices and their disastrous implications for some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Such evidence is not new. Indeed, the Government are well aware of it, given their recent consultation.

Will the Minister set out to the House an exact timetable for legislation to ban conversion therapy? Will he reassure Members that the legislation will include a total ban on those cruel practices? On this Government’s watch, waiting times for gender identity clinics have increased to unlawful levels, leaving at risk thousands who are in need of urgent support. Instead of facing up to the scale of the challenge and committing sufficient funding to alleviate pressures on those services and the rising demand, the Government have plans to open a mere three new gender identity clinics. Such plans will leave nearly 10,000 people on waiting lists.

This is a crisis, and I call on the Government to go back to the drawing board and bring forward a properly resourced plan to support trans and non-binary people who are in urgent need of support. They must bring an end to the unlawful and excruciating waiting times for treatment. This Pride Month I call on the Government to refrain from paying hollow lip service to queer solidarity and liberation, and I call instead for practical actions that are fully within their power to support LGBT+ people.