British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserted his stance on gender identity, saying it was “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” — a remark that sparked criticism from transgender rights activists but elicited fervent applause from Conservative Party Conference attendees.

Sunak promised to legislate that “sexual and sadistic” killers would spend the rest of their lives in prison before listing other positions he said “shouldn’t be controversial,” such as “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,” Sunak said in his closing speech at his party’s annual convention, which was held this year in Manchester. “And we must not be bullied into believing that people can be any gender they want to be.” They are unable to do so. It’s common sense that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.”

Sunak made headlines in April after agreeing with a conservative interviewer who suggested that all women, rather than 99 percent, “don’t have a penis.”

At the time, he took a more conciliatory tone, saying that “we should always have compassion, understanding, and tolerance for those who are thinking about their gender,” but that “the issue of biological sex is fundamentally important” to women’s rights and women’s spaces.

PinkNews, a British LGBTQ+ news outlet, accused Sunak of mocking trans women in June after publishing what it claimed was a secretly recorded video of the prime minister speaking during a meeting with conservative MPs.

Sunak is heard in the video joking that Liberal Democrats party leader Ed Davey “has been very busy” trying to “convince everybody that women clearly had penises.”

“You all know I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths at 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology,” the individual who made the video stated.

The prime minister’s spokesperson defended the remarks, saying they were “a joke aimed at a political opponent rather than a specific group.”

While gender identity is a hotly debated topic among British politicians, an Ipsos poll published in June found that most Britons believe transgender people face discrimination. According to a 2022 survey of approximately 5,000 Britons conducted by the think tank More In Common, 46 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman.” Only about one-third of those polled agreed.

Following Sunak’s speech, prominent transgender newsreader India Willoughby accused the prime minister of “putting people in danger and inciting threats to their lives” in a video posted to the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

“We now have a British government and a prime minister that has said that it doesn’t recognise trans people,” Willoughby stated. “If you don’t acknowledge a group of people exist, then obviously that group of people don’t have rights.”

According to data from the Metropolitan Police Service in Greater London, over 2,800 potential transgender hate crimes were reported between September 2001 and February 2022. The number of reported incidents increased significantly beginning in the mid-2010s, rising from 75 in 2013 to 428 in 2021.