The Times - Is it safe for women to trust Labour again?
JANICE TURNER
Is it safe for women to trust Labour again?
Party’s self-destructive stance on gender has been shelved but there will be no apology for the damage done to many
The Times
‘Firstly,” said Sir Keir Starmer, “a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.” And in uttering this dictionary definition on LBC he revealed a monumental policy shift. For years women have been vilified, silenced, branded bigots, suffered internal party investigations and death threats for holding this very view. Now the Labour leader was not just declaring that the witch-hunts, most notably of JK Rowling, were over, but the witches were right all along.
Why did this cautious, conflict-averse man finally get off the fence? Mainly to neutralise a rare Tory attack line, that Labour can’t define a woman. Starmer, who’d squirmed on TV muttering about cervixes and what percentage of women have penises, knew that until Labour had a coherent answer, this question would blight every election debate.
Labour’s position on gender risked few potential votes in a cost of living crisis but it made its politicians look weak, silly and extreme. So at last Sunday’s National Policy Forum a promise to change the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to a process of self-ID was removed from Labour’s manifesto. Every poll shows that self-ID is unpopular, while even Nicola Sturgeon struggled to justify why the male rapist Adam/Isla Bryson should be housed in a women’s prison and could, on release, use female changing rooms.
Labour presented this new policy as a genius compromise, transcending two puerile opposing factions — gender-critical feminists and trans activists — when in fact it was (subject to small print) what women’s groups wanted all along. The opposition leader’s inner circle might have known that if they’d deigned to meet them, rather than dismissing concerns about legal erasure of biological sex and hard-won female protections as piffling, hysterical and right wing.
Given that this decision was driven by electoral self-interest, can Labour be trusted not to backtrack once in power? Yes, as long as Starmer remains leader. The Labour elite keeps its gender views quiet, but key figures — Bridget Phillipson at education, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, Steve Reid at justice and Shabana Mahmood, national campaign co-ordinator — are quietly gender-critical.
Labour’s most senior gay man, the shadow health minister, Wes Streeting, a former Stonewall education officer, has “been on a journey” in recent years, alarmed by LGBT policy overreach, such as the case of Sarah Summers, a Brighton rape victim denied a single-sex support group. One of Labour’s most generous donors, Fran Perrin, daughter of Lord Sainsbury, has strong feminist views.
We are light years from the 2019 leadership election, where all candidates except canny Starmer signed a pledge to “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights”, and promised to call for the expulsion of members supporting “hate groups” like LGB Alliance and A Woman’s Place. Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up minister, not only signed this but at a hustings declared trans-identifying male rapists should be housed in women’s jails. Now Nandy has “rowed back”, saying she was unduly swayed by young activists in her campaign team.
Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, another trans pledger, is still pro-self-ID, but is knuckling down to win the election while remaining best placed to be Labour’s first woman leader. Even trans activist MPs such as Clive Lewis, Zarah Sultana and the volatile Lloyd Russell-Moyle, forced to apologise for intimidating the Tory MP Miriam Cates, have expressed only muted opposition to the gender pivot, perhaps fearful of deselection. LGBT Labour has imploded, with a moderate faction embracing the new policy.
The National Policy Forum thought they’d been fair to both sides. Feminists were given beefed-up support for single-sex exemptions, while trans activists would get a streamlined gender recognition certificate (GRC) process of just one doctor’s diagnosis rather than a panel. Except trans activist objections to the process aren’t administrative but philosophical. For Stonewall, trans is an identity — which the state must recognise by granting a female birth certificate to any man who requests one — not a medical matter or a mental illness. (Yet, paradoxically, they demand children be put on lifelong drugs and the NHS pay for costly surgeries. So what exactly is being treated?)
Already Russell-Moyle is arguing that the signature of a social worker should replace a doctor’s diagnosis. Meanwhile feminists are concerned by Labour’s promise to abolish the “spousal veto”, which gives a wife the right to divorce or annulment before a full GRC is granted, so she is not thrown into a marriage contract very different from the one she agreed. Also, given that GRCs will be easier and grant new, wholly secret identities, should sex offenders be banned from obtaining them? But this is all small print. Some believe the 2004 Gender Recognition Act can’t be amended so fundamentally: it will need to be binned and redrawn. How high will this come on a Labour government’s to-do list?
The witches won, for now — not that Labour will apologise to those dunked on the ducking stool, like Rosie Duffield or many local councillors and activists. Although still angry, most are just happy that Labour’s new policy will end a chilling of debate in Stonewall-captured institutions and will inform civil servants preparing for government.
At the 2019 Labour conference a feminist meeting to discuss GRA reforms had to be held at a secret venue, but even so trans activists pounded the windows and harassed attendees. This year Labour Women’s Declaration, a group created to defend the Equality Act, will hold a fringe event with shadow cabinet speakers inside the main conference centre, advertised in the official programme. After years of leafleting in the rain, they may even be granted a stall. Women, exiled by Labour for so long, are back inside the tent.
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