Labour Pledges to Shield Transgender Brits From ‘Hate Crimes’ — But Not Women

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Feminists stressed on the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance that no transgender people had been murdered in the UK since January 2019 — but Young London woman Sarah Everard was raped and murdered by a police officer this March, as violence against women remains a huge problem in the country.
The UK's opposition Labour Party has pledged to add transgender people to the list of protected groups in hate crime legislation — but not women.
Labour shadow women and equalities minister Anneliese Dodds announced the pledge to coincide with the annual ‘transgender day of remembrance’.
"All victims of hate crime have a right to expect equal treatment under the law, but that’s not the case today," Dodds claimed.
"Labour will fix this injustice by bringing in tougher, fairer hate crime laws so that every category of hate crime is treated as an aggravated offence — and those who commit hate crimes against LGBT+ and disabled people can no longer get away with softer sentences."
British law allows for convicted criminals to be punished more severely if prosecutors can prove their offences were were aggravated by hatred against the victim on grounds of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
Official figures show the number of reported hate crimes in the UK has been growing steadily in recent years for all those categories except religion, with racially-motivated offences still making up the great majority of hate crimes.
The increase in transgender hate crimes was less, at three per cent, than the seven per cent rise in those motivated by sexuality, nine per cent for disability or 12 per cent for race — and at 2,630 recorded incidents was the smallest set of offences.

Murder Rate in Perspective

At least 375 transgender individuals have reportedly been murdered worldwide so far this year, up from 350 in 2020.
But that figure is relatively very low, representing less than 0.1 per cent of the global annual count of around 450,000 homicides, compared to estimates that around 0.5 per cent of people in some countries are transgender.
Of the 695 murder victims in the UK in the year ending March 2020, 188 were female — 27 per cent — indicating women are far more likely to be murdered than transgender people, while men and boys continue to bear the overwhelming brunt of deadly violence.
Six transgender people have been murdered in the UK in the past 10 years — roughly one in a thousand or 0.1 per cent of the total number of homicides over that period — compared to government estimates of the transgender population of between 0.3 and 0.75 per cent. The last recorded murder of a transgender person in the UK was in January 2019.
In March of this year, outspoken Labour MP Jess Phillips called for misogyny to be made a hate crime amid the public outcry over the rape and murder of London woman Sarah Everard by serving policeman Wayne Couzens.
Phillips also claimed that Home Secretary Priti Patel's criminal justice reforms to ensure convicted rapists serve at least two-thirds of their sentences, as well as protecting domestic violence victims, did not go far enough to protect women.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has opposed adding misogyny to the list of hate crimes, arguing that the existing law should be enforced first and foremost.
Andrew Marr Show in London - Sputnik International, 1920, 26.09.2021
Labour Leader Says It's 'Not Right' to Say Only Women Have a Cervix
Some feminists attacked Labour for focussing on the very small number of murders of transgender people compared to the hundreds of women killed every year.
Labour has previously drawn fore for trying to avoid offence on transgender issues. Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield stayed away from the party's conference in Brighton after receiving online threats from transgedner rights activists for saying she did not support "self-ID as a passport for male-bodied biological men to enter protected spaces for biological women".
During the conference, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told the BBC's Andrew Marr that Duffield was "wrong" to say that only women possess a cervix.
Earlier this week a Labour member revealed he had resigned from the party after being suspended by its head office Disputes Team for writing on social media that only women experience the menopause.
meanwhile former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell praised Ellie-Mae O'Hagan, director of left-wing think-tank CLASS for a BBC TV debate with Duffield in which she claimed nobody knew "why some people are women and some people are men".
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