Keir Starmer’s gender muddle is a disaster for the Labour party

How committed is Keir Starmer to protecting women’s rights? Earlier this month, the Labour leader dismissed the sex and gender identity debate as trivial and irrelevant to the next election, only to backtrack following an intervention by the Prime Minister.  

In an LBC interview earlier this month, Starmer stated: ‘I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much of our time discussing something which isn’t a feature of the dinner table or the kitchen table or the café table or the bar.’ The day before, a Sunday Times interview published statements he made on a train journey to Plymouth the previous Friday in which he tried to court women voters concerned about erasure of biological sex by saying: ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological. . . and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Either one in 1,000 women are walking around with male genitalia and this issue affects a significant proportion of the population, or it is a marginal issue that nobody cares about.