Trans Kids Deserve Better hold vigil for Wes Streeting’s “dead on arrival” integrity

This weekend, Trans Kids Deserve Better once again showed up Wes Streeting and his lack of action and care to protect trans kids.

Trans Kids Deserve Better: taking it to Wes Streeting

On Sunday 24 August, the group of young activists and supporters behind the campaign Kids Are Dying, Wes gathered outside the health secretary’s constituency office. They held a vigil and a moment of silent reflection on the fact that Wes Streeting has watched on for an entire year, whilst TKDB highlighted how dangerous the government’s plans are and did nothing.

The group said:

The puberty blocker ban, led by Wes Streeting via the DHSC, is causing immeasurable harm to trans youth across the country. It, alongside the Cass review, and now the Supreme Court ruling and EHRC’s guidance regarding it, have all been decisions led by ignorance and transphobia, a refusal to involve trans people in discussions about themselves, and a priority given to groups that explicitly oppose our existence. We will not back down when we are ignored.

The activists placed 365 tealights in front of Streeting’s office to symbolise each day that has passed. They decorated the vigil with over 50 paper coffins as well as a coffin-shaped bunting timeline of their campaigning alongside Streeting’s actions:

The centrepiece of the vigil was gravestone that read:

In lacking memory of Wes Streeting’s Integrity, Dead On Arrival. Trans Kids Deserve Better.

They held a minutes silence for his integrity, though said on Instagram that they’re well aware it may never have existed in the first place:

The coffins contained messages to Wes Streeting and mourned trans people who had taken their own lives, both ones close to campaigners and strangers. Messages to Streeting included rightly calling him a traitor, shaming him, and begging him to listen to trans people about their own healthcare.

Others called out his hypocrisy of being a gay man yet throwing his trans siblings under the bus. They asked how he could live with himself as a Christian and if he would be proud of his actions when he finally faced God.

The bunting contained significant moments of the Trans Kids Deserve better campaign including them joining the Trans Strike Back march to the Department for Health and Social Care in April 2024, KADW delivering the first coffin and doing so daily from 28th August 2024, and a die in at Victoria Station in November.

Hypocrisy

This is alongside what Wes Streeting and his team have been doing – including sympathising with Bayswater Group parents, meeting gender critical organisations, and ghosting, then eventually blocking, TKDB on social media.

The group highlighted that whilst Streeting has ignored multiple efforts to engage with them, he’s consulted with multiple anti-trans groups, and he’s even explicitly ignored them when they’ve delivered a coffin straight to his office.

The one line of communication TKDB have had with Streeting has been via Sam Gould, his former aide who was found to have exposed himself to, and followed, a 13-year-old girl. Gould is now under a sexual harm prevention order that prohibits him from contacting girls under 18. Ironic when terves spend a huge chunk of their time calling trans people predators.

For the past year Trans Kid Deserve Better have delivered a paper coffin every single day to Streeting’s office. These have contained different messages from campaigners and supporters ranging from how being trans saved their lives to facts about how hard it is to be trans. Streeting has ignored every single one, including when a pair of activists disrupted his event at Conway Hall to hand deliver a coffin. The person delivering the coffin asked:

Could you bear to look us in the eye and tell us that you’ll let us die?

Wes Streeting must do better

The vigil saw the end of campaign, but it is not the end of TKDB’s campaigning over Wes Streeting’s action.

Trans Kids Deserve Better said in a press release:

The puberty blocker ban, led by Wes Streeting via the DHSC, is causing immeasurable harm to trans youth across the country. It, alongside the Cass review, and now the Supreme Court ruling and EHRC’s guidance regarding it, have all been decisions led by ignorance and transphobia, a refusal to involve trans people in discussions about themselves, and a priority given to groups that explicitly oppose our existence. We will not back down when we are ignored.

The campaign has vowed that although this is the end of their coffin drop campaign, this is not the end of their campaigning against the government restricting trans rights:

We’re going to make sure he sees what we do next; the campaign does not finish with the end of our regular coffin drops.

Featured image supplied