I went down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole today reading about “election firsts” and found some cool/depressing statistics. We all know that the UK has had 0 openly trans MPs and 0 trans Lords, but the same lack of representation is there at all levels of the system.

Looking at the other national legislatures:

  • 0 trans Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs)
  • 0 trans Members of the Senedd (MSs)
  • 0 trans Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLAs)
  • 1 trans UK Member of European Parliament (MEP)

That’s also not great, but it gets so much worse when you look at the local level. I’ve only been able to find record of there being three trans councilors* ever, one of whom went on to be elected mayor.

This gets so much more egregious when you realise that since there are 20,000 council seats across the UK we’d expect at least 66 trans Councilors at any given time (using Stonewalls lower-bound of there being 200,000 UK trans people). Obviously being trans isn’t something every trans person wants to be open about, but equally to be expecting at least 60 and having only 1 currently is wildly unrepresentative.

This isn’t getting into the politics but I thought I’d highlight it because lack of trans representation at a local level isn’t something I’d thought about before this afternoon.

My research for this clearly didn’t go into enough detail! Thanks to u/Michael273 on Reddit for pointing me to Zoe O’Connell’s brilliant blog which is a much better comprehensive summary of trans representation in UK politics.