The UK’s first transgender newsreader India Willoughby revealed that she had been approached by several political parties to run as an MP.
Chatting to hosts Bobby Norris and Ellen Coughlan on the showbiz gossip programme Access All Areas, India responded to being asked whether she would ever pursue a career in politics: “Funnily enough, a couple of parties have put the feelers out to me over the years. The problem is with me, I hate following a script. I’m my own person and if you go into politics you have to toe the party line. So they’ll have a set of views, and even if you disagree with nine of the ten, you’ve got to follow the script. I’m terrible at that. I just like to speak from my heart as it is.”
Later in the interview, India described how she felt transphobia has never been so rife in the UK and within government as it is now: “[Transphobia] is now official government policy. Lee Anderson or 30p Lee has actually said that the two prongs of their election campaign were going to be the asylum seekers, so you have the small boats talk and all of that stuff, and trans people. Basically because they have nothing else left. It’s a really dangerous route to go down because, say somebody came to attack me or Bobby [Norris] on a night out, they’re not going to ask what letter we are! They just know that we’re different in some way. They know we’re LGBT, then they’re going to punch you if you’re lucky or it could be something worse and potentially fatal.”
She continued: “Stupid people don’t differentiate between transphobia and homophobia. To them, we’re all the same. We should be way beyond this everything was so much better even five years ago. From a trans perspective, the world was kind of opening up for us around 2015 or 2016. And they saw the door opening and all these crackpots, these religious right -wing nutters, came in and they poisoned the well and we’ve gone backwards now and it’s really dangerous and it’s really scary.”
Listen to the full episode, also featuring the Dreamboys, here.
