Peer labels fake meat eaters ‘trans veggies’

A PEER has sparked fury after describing people who eat ‘fake meat’ as ‘transgender vegetarians’.

Baroness Deech, 74, was asked on radio whether she would eat vegetarian burgers made to taste like beef and which ‘bleed’ beetroot juice.

She replied: ‘No, I don’t think I would, especially if this thing is being made to look as if it’s bleeding.’

The peer, a former principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, suggested vegetarians should stick to ‘lettuce and spring onions’. Explaining her view, she said: ‘If you do eat meat, you want to feel that you’re somehow getting that protein into you.

‘If you’re going to be a vegetarian you should just go out and eat lettuce and spring onions and be done with it. I don’t like this crossover really. It’s sort of transgender vegetarianism.’

Her remarks were criticised on Twitter, with one user calling her a ‘patronising idiot’, while others accused her of being transphobic. Playwright Shelley Silas tweeted: ‘Ruth Deech what the hell is “transgender vegetarianism”? It’s offensive to the transgender community, just as anti-Semitism is offensive to you and me. Please think about what you say.’

Twitter user James Clarke wrote: ‘All the more shocking that @BaronessDeech had senior roles in further education, has a current role in parliament and yet remains so hideously illinformed. Words fail me.’

Baroness Deech, who joined the House of Lords in 2005, is a crossbench peer.

Her comments came in a Radio 4 interview on Sunday in which she also took aim at ‘snowflake’ students who she accused of shutting down speeches on transgender issues. She said: ‘Universities are places where you should be able to say everything that’s within the law.

‘You have to adopt a certain attitude to be in the in- crowd and there are things you cannot say. I’m dismayed at what has been going on in some quarters in the student world, really.’