#VanPoli | Trans Rights | Never Let Hate Nor the Politics of Expedience Win

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Former British prime minister Tony Blair. (Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Tony Blair, and the Rise of Lowest Common Denominator Politics

Like your uncle in the family group chat, in these pandemic times of ours, Tony Blair has once again given his unsolicited opinion on politics.

The former three-term British Labour Prime Minister has urged Britain’s main opposition leader, Labour leader Keir Starmer, to “reject the wokeism of the minority” if he wants to win the next general election.

In a blistering appraisal of the Labour Party leader, Blair blasted the party’s decline. The hard left, Blair wrote in the foreword of a new report into Labour voters published this past Friday, November 26th, by the firm Deltapoll for the Tony Blair for Global Change Institute, must be considered the “enemy”.

Blair urged Labour to adopt a “commonsensical position on the ‘culture’ issues”, likening Labour’s current situation with voters to 1983, when the party was pelted over its support for LGB(T)G2+ rights. Blair argued that “large numbers of Labour voters in 1983 felt our economic policy was not credible and our attitudes across a range of cultural questions profoundly alienating”.

Tony Blair said Labour must ‘turn a corner’ under Sir Keir Starmer to win the next general election

Blair has long felt that trans rights – the rights of one of the most marginalized and vulnerable demographics in the country — are part of a culture war that Labour must distance itself from, at one point warning Labour to not “look askance” at JK Rowling over her views. Veteran moderates such as Blair himself, he said, “don’t quite understand the strength in feeling over issues such as trans rights”. To speak out for trans rights, he said, is an “electoral off-putting position for Labour”.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews, the disabled and homosexuals for Germany’s decline. Within a dozen years, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews, and 2 million disabled persons & members of the LGBTQ community.

Throughout our history, members of the gay community have had no rights, have lived in the shadows. All that changed in the 1970s with the rise of the gay rights movement, made ever more urgent when AIDS disproportionately affected that community. Even as recently as 2005, former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn’t recognize the gay community as having inalienable rights, never mind the right to marry.

More change was wrought when, only six years ago, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that a fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that states must allow same-sex marriage.

Paul Martin’s Liberal government legislated same sex marriage in 2005.

Canadian astrophysicist Amita Kuttner, interim leader of the Green Party of Canada, and the first transgender, non-binary leader of a Canadian political party.

Here we are in 2021.

Which much discriminated against and disenfranchised group of citizens among us is left for us to blame our tales of woe on? Donald Trump had a ready answer to that question: members of the transgender community, who he ordered on April 12, 2019 to be discharged from service in the U.S. military.

“The Trump Administration is built on demonizing minority groups; reversing the civil rights gains of immigrants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ movement. We cannot let an incompetent administration guided by a petulant bigot stand as the mascot of our time,” wrote Harper Jean Tobin, Director of Policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality, in 2019.

President Joe Biden reversed, then eliminated Trump’s execrable order.


What’s wrong with us? Why isn’t Vancouver City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung our most sought after, most inevitable 2022 star candidate for Mayor of Vancouver? #DraftSarah

In 2021, no thinking and compassionate person would come out against the rights of our immigrant communities, our black and Asian populations, our Jewish community, the rights of girls and women to lead productive lives, nor deny the inalienable rights of members of our LGB(T)Q2+ communities.

Yet, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair not only finds it acceptable to dehumanize members of the trans community, but actually gives instruction to Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, to work against the interests of the transgender community, as he believes support for trans people is “alienating” for the working class British electorate who might otherwise vote for Labour, were it not for Labour’s turn to what he terms as ‘wokeism’.

Note should be made, too, that not one of Vancouver’s announced, or projected, 2022 Mayoral candidates — ABC’s Ken Sim, the NPA’s John Coupar — although, John did retweet the Bloedel Conservatory’s acknowledgement —  Progress Vancouver’s Mark Marissen, TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick, Coalition Vancouver’s Wai Young, nor anyone associated with OneCity Vancouver, the Greens or COPE, acknowledged the Trans Day of Remembrance, on Saturday, November 20th.

Into Light shares the story of a mother and child undergoing a transformative exploration of gender identity | Directed by filmmaker Sheona McDonald | Provided by the National Film Board of Canada

If our projected 2022 Mayoral candidates have failed to acknowledge our transgender community, at least someone at Vancouver City Hall has.

Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

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