MPs laugh at bizarre, unrelated and unprompted anti-trans joke in House of Commons
Philip Davies made an anti-trans joke during Prime Minister’s Questions (Gov)
A Conservative MP has made an anti-trans joke during an unrelated debate in the House of Commons.
On Wednesday (13 September), Rishi Sunak faced fellow MPs during Prime Minister’s Questions. He was grilled over problems facing the UK’s prisons and schools, with Keir Starmer labelling him “Inaction Man”.
The Labour leader said: “Probation, prison, schools, China: yet again, Inaction Man fails to heed the warnings, then blames everyone else.
“He is failing to stop terrorists strolling out of prison, failing to guard Britain against hostile actors, he is completely failing to stop the boats. How can anyone trust him to protect the country?”
A little later, Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, in West Yorkshire, posed a question about whether inmates who assault prison officers while behind bars should be refused early released – before making an out-of-the-blue jibe about misgendering.
“It’s vitally important that we retain, recruit and protect our prison officers,” he said. “So, will the prime minister agree to stop any prisoner who assaults a prison officer from being released early from jail?
“This simple measure will be very popular with prison officers, it will be very popular with the public, and it might even find favour with the parties opposite who normally think that the only people who should be in prison are [those] who misgender people.”
The barb resulted in a wave of laughter from MPs.
Tories have a history of anti-trans jokes
This is not the first time a Conservative MP has made an anti-trans joke.
In June, exclusive footage shared with PinkNews showed Sunak secretly mocking trans people by joking about “women having penises”, as well as making fun of Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey for supporting trans rights.
In the footage, which was secretly filmed at a party of the influential 1922 Committee, Sunak can be heard saying: “It shows his spectacular misjudgment and why he’s completely unfit to lead our country,” presumably about Starmer.
“Over the same period of time, you might have noticed Ed Davey has been very busy,” Sunak continued. “Like me, you can probably see that he was trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises.
“You’ll all know that I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths [until they are] 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology.”
A month later, Suella Braverman also unleashed an anti-trans attack on Starmer in the House of Commons.
The comments were made in response to a question from fellow Tory MP Nick Fletcher who referred to a viral tweet about Mika Minio-Pauello, a transgender woman and mother who came under fire from anti-trans activists after taking part in an ITV News segment on the cost-of-living crisis.
Fletcher accused Minio-Pauello of mocking women by breastfeeding her child, and called on Braverman to launch a safeguarding investigation into the child’s welfare.
While the home secretary avoided commenting on safeguarding concerns, she instead said: “It is remarkable that we are in a position where the Labour Party leader cannot define a woman. I think he said something like 99.9 per cent of women do not have a penis.
“On that basis, we cannot rule him out from running to be Labour’s first female prime minister.”
Fellow Conservatives, however, remained relatively quiet after the supposed quip, which social media users described as a “tumbleweed moment”.
