radiofree.asia

Another Your Party MP is accused of ‘explicit transphobia’

On 14 November, Adnan Hussain of the Independent Alliance of MPs stepped away from the Your Party steering process. Your Party supporters have previously accused Hussain of transphobia, leading to reactions like the following:

Now, Independent Alliance MP Iqbal Mohamed has defended Hussain’s past comments, drawing transphobia accusations of his own.

Your Party suggesting a ‘third space’

Maryam Jameela wrote the following for the Canary on 7 September:

Both Corbyn and Sultana have been rare shining lights in British politics over the last few years. At the Canary we’d love nothing more than for whatever Your Party becomes to be successful. We have the same values, the same politics, and the same goals.

So, when we say the following it’s in the spirit of wanting to work together to have better futures for the people that have been abandoned by mainstream politics: Your Party has a transphobia problem brewing and it must be addressed.

In that article, she highlighted messages from Hussain including the following:

 As Jameela noted:

It has become a transphobic talking point to consider trans people a threat to cis women’s spaces. Hussain’s easy agreement with this moral panic is extremely worrying.

Hussain’s argument that ‘socially conservative’ Muslims should be free to hold transphobic views was not shared by a majority of potential Your Party supporters, it turned out. And importantly, people on the left are not supportive of the same argument in reverse.

A recent example of this was when trans essayist Contrapoints issued a statement in which she criticised the left for vociferously opposing the Palestinian genocide. In that post, she admitted her feelings were driven in part by the fact that she’s a trans woman, as she believed the pro-Palestinian movement made it impossible for the genocide-overseeing Kamala Harris to win the 2024 election — ultimately resulting in the aggressively transphobic Trump seizing power.

How did the left respond?

They certainly didn’t respond by saying trans people should have space to diminish the West’s collective responsibility for an Islamophobic genocide.

For the most part, leftists told Contrapoints that you cannot pick and choose which groups deserve human rights, and that if Kamala Harris didn’t want to lose the 2024 election, she should have pledged to end Israel’s genocide — something she could have achieved with a phone call once she became president.

‘In logic or law’

Iqbal Mohamed has now suggested he holds the same opinion as Adnan Hussain:

This is how people responded:

We should note that Mohamed didn’t explicitly say he agrees with Hussain. We approached Mohamed to ask him to clarify his position, but he hadn’t responded at the point of publication. He has tweeted since we asked the question, however, posting a response to Ben Smoke’s comment above about ‘segregated facilities’:

Novara, meanwhile, has reported that Mohamed may have already been on his way out:

Featured image via Iqbal Mohamed

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.