They wrote in an email to What The Trans:
To whom it may concern,
I am a representative of BASH BACK, a trans led direct action group devoted to tackling the rising tide of transphobia in the UK. As I write this, actionists are conducting our first action at Wes Streeting’s office in Ilford North.
Wes Streeting, as you well know, is responsible for a heinous ban on puberty blockers for trans youth, as well as a swathe of other restrictions on transgender people’s healthcare rights.
He is also, according to at least one legal professional, personally responsible for covering up reports of the deaths of trans young people under the care of NHS England. Every day, trans people are dying as a result of his policies and his inaction.
As trans people, we refuse to take this lying down any longer. We have chosen to take action to demonstrate that we will not be victimised or scapegoated by Streeting and his ilk any longer. We will not allow more of our loved ones to be to be harrassed, to be legislated, to be excluded, to be denied healthcare, to be murdered. We are trans and we BASH BACK.
https://www.transbashback.com/
I can't say I really find fault in what they did here. I'm against a lot of the calls for violent and destructive behavior that has become a daily thing on Lemmy, but from a quick reading up on Streeting, it sounds like other more peaceful means have been ineffectual over the last year+.
Reading TBB's info, they seem to only support limited damage of property of specific individuals that are causing them to have lives ruined or ended due to a denial of necessary services for political, not medical purposes. Streeting refuses to meet and talk with pro-trans groups, while finding repeated occasions to meet with extreme anti-trans organizations.
As someone in charge of providing health services to the public, Streeting is not serving the people he is sworn to protect and is actively contributing to their harm. Having a window broken, while properly not a legal response, is still significantly less damaging than what Streeting is contributing to. When you leave people with no legal course of action, then they are only left with illegal means of being heard, so he has made things like this inevitable. That the trans activists are limiting themselves to the minimum of disruption while their people are dying says a lot to their patience and reluctance to cause the same harm directed toward them.
For a successful movement, there will always be necessary a group of people being civil, but also a group willing to go to the next level for making those that want to ignore their peaceful voices and to show people cannot just trample all over them. I won't call it a necessary evil, because I don't think it is malicious and unrestrained. It is simply people becoming more desperate due to a situation they've been backed into.
I was also a bit surprised as someone just learning about Wes Streeting (I'm not UK) that he is an openly gay man who has done a lot to support LG and presumably B, but not the T communities in the past. If it isn't too off topic or inflammatory to get into, can someone give me a brief explainer why he would be anti-trans? I know trans isn't the same as gay, so is this just the male version of being a TERF or is there more to it? If this is just ignorant, please ignore this paragraph.
To your last paragraph, I think it's a mixture of two things. The first being that the UK has become increasingly horrifically transphobic over the past decade, and this current bunch in Labour are opportunists who will just go where they think the votes are. He once said "trans women are women, trans men are men" but several years later changed his view to "men have penises, women have vaginas." The party has no courage or backbone now to stick up for anyone, because they think conceding to the right wing will win them votes.
The second being that Wes Streeting is known to be one of the more conservative members of the Labour party, both economically and socially. There's some genuinely upsetting stuff on his Wikipedia page under political beliefs, such as his support for conversion therapy organisations.
Thank you, that makes some sense. I'm from the US, so very much familiar with the ones that are supposed to be representing a more liberal set of positions selling out some of the smaller groups to try and find broader appeal across those party lines. I did see about his backpedaling about acknowledging trans peoples' genders.
It does often tend to sting a bit more when you get backstabbed by someone who was supposed to at least be sympathetic to your side, rather than someone you knew always disliked you. Streeting seems to have gotten himself into this position of disapproval in a similar way with the trans activists. It's not like the activists are making threats to him or vowing to fight him forever, they just want to be treated as human beings, and if that happens, there won't be any more vandalism. Sounds more than fair.