Tory Split Erupts As Candidate Calls Out Party For Attacking Transgender Rights
Conservative candidate Elliot Colburn has called out his own party for attacking the transgender community once again.
Colburn, who is fighting to retain the Carshalton and Wallington seat he won as a Tory in 2019, made his feelings clear by responding to the Conservatives’ official account on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday.
The Conservatives posted: “We know what a woman is. Keir Starmer doesn’t.”
Colburn replied: “Here we go again, wondered how long it would take.”
Here we go again, wondered how long it would take 🤦♂️ https://t.co/bmrmLHAjyq
— Elliot Colburn (@ElliotColburn) June 3, 2024
His comments will likely frustrate those in CCHQ considering the party is attempting to promote its plans to alter the Equality Act today.
If the Conservatives are re-elected, they have promised to allow organisations to ban transgender women from entering single-sex spaces and to rewrite the definition of sex to be confined to biological sex.
The Tories have tried to turn trans rights into a wedge issue by repeatedly claiming Keir Starmer has been unclear when it comes to defining sex.
The Labour leader hardened his stance last summer by condemning gender self-identification and claiming a woman is an “adult female”.
Tory candidate Colburn has pleaded with his party in the past to stop “demonising trans people”.
Last October, while speaking at a fringer event at the party’s conference in Manchester, he said; “I want to make one thing perfectly clear to our Conservative colleagues. We will not win the next general election fighting with the LGBT+ community.
“I do not meet people on the doorsteps that say: ‘you know what, I am struggling with the most of living right now, my mortgage has gone up, I am worried about heating this winter, but I will forget all of that, as long as you stop trans people playing sport’. No one is saying that to me.”
He added: “The Conservative Party has come so far.
“We are the party that was responsible for Section 28. We have rightly apologised for that. We have tried so hard. David Cameron in particular tried to detoxify this party.
“We have to drop this hardcore rhetoric and we have to drop it now.”
