Gay Tory kicked out of Suella Braverman speech explains why ‘gender ideology’ doesn’t exist
Gay Tory Andrew Boff was kicked out of the Tory Party Conference room after criticising Suella Braverman’s speech. (Getty)
The gay Tory politician who was thrown out of Suella Braverman’s conference speech has argued that so-called ‘gender ideology’ doesn’t exist.
Conservative leader for the London Assembly, Andrew Boff, said that he hasn’t heard a convincing argument as to what gender ideology actually is, adding that it’s used by people “who don’t much like trans people.”
Boff was forcibly removed from the main auditorium of the Conservative Party conference on Tuesday (3 October) after quietly muttering, during Suella Braverman’s speech, that “there’s no such thing as gender ideology”.
The home secretary claimed in her speech that the UK would “go woke” under a Labour government with “gender ideology, white privilege, and anti-British history.”
In his Monday (9 October) interview with GB News host, Andrew Doyle, Boff explained that he took issue not just with her comments on trans and non-binary people, but all marginalised groups.
“There was a general feeding frenzy, as far as I can see, on vulnerable people – asylum seekers for example.
“She went on to trash human rights that we’ve been building up in this country for, well, since Magna Carta really. The Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, all of that was dismissed as luxury beliefs.”
He went on to explain that he believed the term gender ideology to have no specific meaning and is used by transphobes to “vilify” trans and non-binary people.
‘I know of no ideology’
Doyle responded by claiming that Braverman’s comments on ‘gender ideology’ were based on vaguely described “specific concerns.”
“Which specific concerns?” Boff responded.
“That term, gender ideology, I know of no ideology. The only thing I know about LGBT ideology is that, generally speaking, it’s against people wearing cargo shorts.
“I just don’t see that it even exists.”
Doyle responded by giving his own view of what ‘gender ideology’ meant, saying he believed it to mean activists who think “gender self-identification supersedes biological sex,” which Boff described as “rubbish.”
“We’ve had transgender people in this country forever,” Boff added.
“One of our greatest travel writers, [1950s’ journalist] Jan Morris, she transitioned in the 60s. She was never a problem.
“Why was there never a huge fuss at the time of [1960s’ trans model] April Ashley? Trans women and trans men have been using facilities appropriate to their gender for years. Why has it all of a sudden become a problem?”
In the final leg of the interview, Doyle claimed there was “overwhelming evidence” to suggest that individuals assigned male at birth are abusing identification laws to be housed in women’s prisons, which Boff refuted.
“There isn’t overwhelming evidence of that happening,” Boff continued. “When you bear in mind the number of people in prisons and the number of people who are transgender in prisons. What they do is they come up with about one or two cases.
“In prisons, there tends to be a lot of bad people and so it is the duty of those prison authorities to keep people safe. It’s a failure of those prison authorities.”
Boff was then cut off by Doyle before being able to cite the recent Home Office statistics which found hate crimes against trans and non-binary had skyrocketed, which the GB News host denied existed.
The government statistics released on Thursday (5 October) revealed that transphobic hate crimes surged from 2,728 in 2021-2022 to 4,262 in the following year.
In its report, the Home Office admitted that trans issues had been “heavily discussed” across the UK and that political discussion by right-wing media, politicians, and social media pundits could have led to “an increase in these offences.”
