A rise in hate crimes against transgender people may have been fuelled by comments by politicians, the Home Office has admitted.
Transgender identity hate crimes have risen by 11 per cent in the year up to March 2023, to the highest number since the figures started being recorded in 2012. Recorded crimes have gone from 4,262 in 2022 to 4,732 this year.
A Home Office briefing outlining the statistics, published on Thursday, said: “Transgender issues have been heavily discussed by politicians, the media and on social media over the last year, which may have led to an increase in these offences, or more awareness in the police in the identification and recording of these crimes.”
The mention of politicians was not included in the reasons given for transgender hate crimes the previous year, where crimes were attributed to heavy discussion on social media.
The revelation comes after a Tory party conference with a strong focus on the trans debate and months after Rishi Sunak was accused of weaponising trans issues. Labour has not escaped criticism on the issue amid a row within the party over its position on trans rights.
The prime minister was criticised for his comments in his speech at the conference on Wednesday, in which he said: “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be – they can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.”
Six cabinet ministers also used their conference speeches to speak about transgender issues, with the home secretary Suella Braverman criticising “gender ideology” for being “presented to workforces and the public as if they are motherhood and apple pie”.
Conservative London Assembly member, Andrew Boff, was ejected from Ms Braverman’s speech for objecting to her comments by saying: “There’s no such thing as gender ideology”.
Speaking to reporters after he was removed from the conference centre, Mr Boff said: “It is making our Conversative Party look transphobic and homophobic. Our party has a proud record of standing up for LGBT+ rights and she is destroying it.”
And health secretary Steve Barclay insisted that Tories “know what a woman is” as he announced trans women would be banned from women-only NHS hospital wards.
Britain’s first openly transgender MP, Conservative Jamie Wallis, told The Independent that Mr Barclay should solve problems “which actually exist”. He said there was “no evidence of even a single complaint about the presence of trans women in particular spaces”.
Sir Keir Starmer has faced backbench opposition after he said “99.9 per cent of women” do not have penis. He was criticised by Labour MP Rosie Duffield who suggested it had left many in the party “livid” and there were concerns that his stance risked rolling back women’s rights.
The number of overall hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales has fallen year-on-year for the first time in a decade.
A total of 145,214 offences were recorded in the year ending March 2023, down 5 per cent from 153, 536 in the previous 12 months.
Religious hate crimes increased – rising nine per cent year-on-year.
The recorded rise in transgender identity crimes comes after a nationwide survey found that British people are growing less accepting of transgender people.
The National Centre for Social Research found that over the past three years, hostility towards transgender people has increased.
Some 64 per cent of those surveyed described themselves as not prejudiced at all against transgender people, a decline of 18 percentage points since 2019.
Just 30 per cent of people think someone should be able to have the sex on their birth certificate altered if they want, down from 53 per cent in 2019.
Becca Rosenthal, national hate crime lead at charity Victim Support, said: “It is extremely concerning to see an 11 per cent rise in transphobic hate crime, a figure which rises to 22 per cent in Wales. We know that transphobic hate crime is seriously under reported – and transgender victims who we support tell us that hostility towards the community is getting worse.”