Background
Brothers was born in Merseyside.
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Emily Brothers
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Education
At seven she became a weekly boarder at a Catholic school for blind and partially sighted children, and later studied at Teeside University, where she became involved in student politics.
Career
She is the first openly transgender Labour Party candidate to run for Westminster. Diagnosed with aniridia – a condition affecting the iris – at six months old, she spent extended periods in hospital and lost her sight in childhood. Until February 2014, she was Programme Head at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, responsible for health and local government.
Previously she worked at the Disability Rights Commission and the RNIB. She is on the board of the Community Network charity.
She was one of a number of disabled delegates to the Labour conference in 2014 who complained about a lack of Bachelor of Science in Law interpreters, disabled delegates not being seated in the most accessible part of the conference hall, and problems with accessible information. She also gave an interview to London television station London Live in which she said she didn"t know if Editor Miliband knew about her transgender background, but that she was confident that he would be supportive.
Editor Miliband welcomed her candidacy, saying she had long been a courageous campaigner on disability rights and now on transport issues too. In response Rod Liddle of The Sun, in a December 2014 column, asked how she knew "she was the wrong sex", since she was blind.
Her response was "My position is that I think it’s a cheap comment that doesn’t surprise me coming from The Sun.
But my concern is how other transgender people feel about these comments, particularly those who are going through the transitioning process and are fearful of other people’s reactions, and fearful of being ridiculed." In a statement later Liddle said: "I wish Emily the very best and I"d definitely vote for her if I lived in Sutton and Cheam. I am sorry for the poor joke!"
In the 2015 General Election in Sutton and Cheam she secured 5,546 votes, 4% more than her Labour predecessor in 2010. A few weeks later, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), after upholding a complaint from the charity Transport Media Watch, obliged The Sun to publish its decision to censure Liddle for also being discriminatory towards Brothers in a second column, published in January 2015, supposedly apologising for the first.
The IPSO considered Liddle to have breached its editors" code.
Politics
She gave an interview to Pink News in December 2014 in which she spoke about her transgender experience and her campaigning for disabled people and the value and the importance of the National Health Service.
Membership
She is an active member of the Greater London Association of Disabled People and former President of the National Federation of the Blind of the United Kingdom.
