A leaked video sourced by Pink News showed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak joking about Lib Dem leader Ed Davey for supporting trans rights.
The recording was made at a party on June 5 with the 1922 Committee, and a photo also seen by Pink News suggests that up to 100 Conservative MPs were in attendance.
The 1922 Committee is a group of all-Conservative backbench MPs that meets every week when Parliament is sitting.
Notable politicians attending the party included 1922 Committee chair Sir Graham Brady, veteran’s affairs minister Johnny Mercer, Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering, and Desmond Swain, MP for New Forest West.
Here’s a look at what Mr Sunak said in the video and his wider public views about transgender people.
What did Rishi Sunak say in the video?
In the video, apparently recorded secretly at the event, Mr Sunak is heard to comment on “his spectacular misjudgement and why he’s completely unfit to lead our country”.
While he doesn’t name any names, it seems likely that the prime minister is talking about Labour leader Keir Starmer.
“Over the same period of time, you might have noticed Ed Davey has been very busy,” Mr Sunak continues. “Like me, you can probably see that he was trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises.
“You’ll all know that I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths to 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology.”
These comments were made at a private event where Mr Sunak will probably not have expected any media to be present or aware of what he’s saying.
However, one attender decided to share the video with Pink News, saying: “The veneer of freedom of speech publicly is one thing but to make jokes in private, it’s another thing altogether. You wouldn’t make jokes about other marginalised people the way he did about trans people. There was laughter, there were quite a few younger attendees who looked visibly uncomfortable.”
This comes after Mr Sunak backed barring trans people from single-sex spaces last April.
Writing for the Daily Express, the prime minister expressed his support for the paper’s “crusade” against what it described as “trans-extremism”, in a campaign sparked by two “gender-critical” MPs.
“When it comes to women’s spaces, women’s prisons, changing rooms, sports, health, I believe that biological sex really matters,” Mr Sunak wrote. “I know what a woman is – and I’ll protect women’s rights and women’s spaces. That’s why I am supporting the Express’s campaign today.”
How has Rishi Sunak voted on trans issues in the past?
While Mr Sunak has not been an MP long enough to vote on many significant issues related to trans people, the PM did oversee the unprecedented use of a Section 35 order in January, moving to block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Act.
This reform aimed to make it easier for trans people to gain legal recognition as their chosen gender without the need for a medical diagnosis.
