MANCHESTER, England (LifeSiteNews) — U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak came out swinging against radical transgender ideology on Wednesday, declaring that Brits “shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be.”
In a speech on the fourth and final day of the annual Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, Sunak said it “shouldn’t be controversial for parents to know what their children are being taught in school about relationships, patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women.”
“And we shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be,” he said. “They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.”
According to Sunak, “in too many parts of our permanent state, virtue signaling has replaced common sense.”
This isn’t the first time Sunak has earned notice for criticizing transgender ideology.
In June, he took a jab at Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who had defended the notion that biological men with the full anatomy of males could actually be women, The Guardian reported at the time.
“Like me, you can probably see that he was trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises,” Sunak said to Conservative MPs in a video leaked to radical pro-LGBT outlet PinkNews.
“You’ll all know that I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths to 18 [years old], but it turns out that we need to focus on biology to 18,” the prime minister joked.
Sunak had previously refused to support Tory MP Danny Kruger’s conservative assertion in May that “that the normative family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – this is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.”
The BBC reached Sunak’s spokesman for comment on the matter and reported that the prime minister “does not agree with a Conservative MP’s claim about the role of conventional family values in society.”
READ: British PM Rishi Sunak mocks transgender ideology in leaked recording
And Sunak is not the only political leader to recognize and call out the absurdity and real harms of radical transgender ideology.
During the same conference, U.K. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay promised to adapt National Health Service (NHS) guidelines to protect female patients by prohibiting gender-confused men from accessing the same hospital wards designated for women, LifeSiteNews reported.
Barclay said the NHS needs “a relentless focus on patient outcomes,” which “does not mean spending huge sums of taxpayer’s money on diversity consultants or hiring internal diversity and inclusion teams. And it does not mean ignoring patients’ voices – especially women’s voices – when it comes to the importance of biological sex in healthcare.”
“If we do not get this right now, the long-term consequences could be very serious for the protection of women and future generations,” he said. And, Conference, I know as conservatives, we know what a woman is,” he said. “And I know the vast majority of NHS staff and patients do, too.”
READ: UK health secretary vows to change NHS rules to affirm biological sex: ‘We know what a woman is’
Barclay said he’s already “ordered a reversal of unacceptable changes to the NHS website” pertaining to transgender ideology and vowed to “change the NHS Constitution, following a consultation later this year, to make sure we respect the privacy, dignity and safety of all patients, recognize the importance of different biological needs and protect the rights of women.”
The U.K.’s rightward shift comes after the NHS earned international bad press for its infamous Tavistock Clinic, which was responsible for the irreversible mutilation of gender-confused minors. The scandal-ridden clinic was finally shuttered last summer.