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Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of London this weekend for the city's annual Trans+ Pride March, even in the midst of a thunderstorm.
Estimates ranged from 25,000 to over 35,000 attendees, likely marking this year's march as the biggest in the event's five-year history. Last year’s march was the largest at that time, at an estimated 20,000 attendees.
Participants gathered at Trafalgar Square at 1 p.m. and marched a little over a mile to Wellington Arch, where community members and organizations delivered speeches until 5 p.m. Speakers included activist and model Munroe Bergdorf, who said that the trans community is living in a “particularly sinister moment in history,” per comments reported by PinkNews.
“The human rights, wellbeing, dignity and bodily autonomy of transgender human beings have been disregarded in the pursuit of inducing a moral panic, devoid of empathy and understanding, fueled by anger and apathy,” she added.
Bergdorf also implored allies to fight on behalf of trans people “now more than ever.” “If you don’t fight with us, then things are not going to change,” she said. “We need to stand hand in hand, arm in arm. We need to understand that change comes with pushback, and that’s not just pushback from us, pushing back against this Tory government that is then pushing back against us before every single significant breakthrough in history.”
She added that the pushback trans people are seeing from conservatives was happening because the trans community is “on the precipice of a breakthrough,” as the event’s historic attendance might point to.
Heartstopper star and recipient of Them’s Now Award in Film & TV Yasmin Finney was also in attendance, leading the crowd in a chant of, “Trans rights are human rights.”
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She also told a videographer with Getty Images that the March was important “to show that we’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”
Like Bergdorf, Finney implored allies to step up for the trans community. “You need to uplift everyone and you can’t just uplift one community, you need to uplift all of us,” she said.
Trans+ Pride organizers wrote about the “abundance of love, togetherness and action” at the event on Instagram. “It was POWERFUL to see so many transgender, intersex, non-binary, gender non-conforming people and our allies take to the streets,” the post reads.
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London Trans+ Pride added that they are already preparing for next year’s march, writing that “with the upcoming election our protest will be more important than ever.”
“We are still facing abysmal waiting times on the NHS, the right-wing media is emboldening bigots to commit violence towards our community and our very own government mocks us,” the organization wrote.
Access to gender-affirming care has been a crisis in the U.K. for years, with the National Health Service (NHS) announcing that it would stop prescribing puberty blockers to trans adolescents last month. A June 2022 study found that the average waiting time for a first appointment with a gender identity clinic in the U.K. is 18 months. British media has also been covering trans people and trans activism in alarmist ways for years, including transmisogynist coverage from the BBC, as well as coverage of Trans+ Pride, in which some Daily Mail headlines focused on a speaker who issued a a call to “punch TERFs in the face.”
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