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. It cannot be both.
On April 13th, sensing a glaring opportunity, Rishi Sunak cut the linguistic Gordian knot currently entangling the Labour party by stating categorically that no women have penises and that the Conservative government will protect women’s sex-based rights.
Now Starmer has readjusted his views again to position Labour as the true defender of single-sex spaces by signalling his support for single-sex wards and a biological definition of sex. ‘For me, patient security, safety and peace of mind comes first. That’s why we support single-sex wards,’ the Labour leader told the Telegraph yesterday.
How entrenched can a politician’s positions be when they change almost daily? Whatever point Keir Starmer has been trying to make as he tumbles through the gender maze, he must know that this is not really a marginal issue. For a warning, he need only look at the former First Minister of Scotland.
Nicola Sturgeon’s accomplished and tenacious career ended abruptly in March following a public backlash against the SNP’s determination to impose sweeping gender identity law reform through their Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Unlike Starmer, Sturgeon did not dither endlessly while trying to placate both God and the devil. But like Starmer, she downplayed concerns about the safety, dignity and privacy of women being eroded by gender identity policies as marginal and unfounded.
Sturgeon accused her critics, including the British government which used executive powers to block her Gender Bill, of having no ‘persuasive or compelling arguments’ against her legislative proposal, even claiming at one point that dissenters were merely hiding broader societal prejudices under the banner of women’s rights:
‘There are some people that I think have decided to use women’s rights as a sort of cloak of acceptability to cover up what is transphobia. There are people who have opposed this bill that cloak themselves in women’s rights to make it acceptable, but just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.’
In September 2021, faced with mounting criticism that would eventually cull her political ambitions and career, the First Minister dismissed concerns, saying:
‘We should focus on the real threats to women, not the threats that, while I appreciate that some of these views are very sincerely held, in my view, are not valid.’
By early 2023, the concerns from the public materialised, personified in the form of Adam Graham, a male double rapist who claimed to be female. While awaiting sentencing for the abuse of women, he was remanded to a women’s prison where he represented a tangible danger to the female prisoners.
The wrath of the public over the Adam Graham case sent one clear message: the rights of female prisoners are not marginal. Just as the rights to women seeking to play sports in fair competitions, accessing sexual abuse and domestic violence refuges, or needing intimate care away from males are not marginal.
The lack of commitment to clear policy and positions on this matter represent an incoming disaster for the Labour party. How many years has it been since grassroots campaigners, colleagues and ‘people in the know’ tried to gently explain the sex and gender debate, over and over, to Keir Starmer? At what point can we declare that the most likely answer is that perhaps he simply does not care?
Trying to reason with the Labour leader about the importance of protecting women’s rights year after year feels like the public is being forced to potty-train an extremely reluctant politician who thinks he knows better than everybody while grasping nothing at all.
As a progressive campaigner, few things would make me happier – and a lot of my work much easier – than to have resolute leadership in political parties and institutions standing firmly against the alarming bullying, harassment and abuse of feminists like me at the hands of trans activists. Yet my sympathies do not extend to mollycoddling an adult man who should – either as a matter of personal interests or because it falls within the remit and duties of his position – understand his own mind about what has become a matter of high politics and the national interest.
Last week, in an interview published in Conservative Home, the Prime Minister argued:
‘The issue of biological sex is fundamentally important. That’s why we need to make sure, particularly when it comes to women’s health, women’s sports and women’s spaces, that we are protecting those rights.’
Rishi Sunak expresses these views with the casual confidence of a politician who is certain that the only opposition to this would come from electorally insignificant fringes, who react with unbridled rage to statements of fact about biology. Meanwhile, stating the obvious will only garner him support from sensible voters up and down the country. Why can’t Labour see that?
Who would have thought that the question ‘what is a woman?’ would become the undoing of so many politicians? A mere biological fact that is so self-evident that it does not merit teaching in primary school is proving too tricky for men and women who are meant to be capable of running the entire country.
Rather than tying himself in contradicting knots and expressing bland and toothless commitments, it is time for Sir Keir Starmer to show some decisiveness and lead – if he has any intention of governing.
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