Perhaps JK Rowling should be the leader of the opposition. She describes herself as ‘left leaning’, she has a huge following, and she also knows what a woman is. Writing in the Times this morning, Rowling defends her friend Rosie Duffield – the Labour candidate for Canterbury – following the appalling abuse she has suffered both in the past and during the current election campaign:
Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she’s had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings.
Keir Starmer – the actual leader of the opposition – has been notable for his lack of support for Duffield, who won Canterbury for Labour when there was no talk of a Labour supermajority. He ignored her when he launched the Labour election campaign in Kent, though he was happy to travel to Dover to welcome Natalie Elphicke, after she had defected from the Tories.
It seems that in Starmer’s mind, a defector is more worthy than an MP who flew Labour’s flag in 2017 and 2019. Duffield, however, also knows what a woman is, and forced the issue for her party leader. After she had joined in online criticism of a tweet that talked about ‘individuals with cervixes’, Starmer was asked if it was transphobic to say only women have a cervix. His reply? ‘Well, it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right’.
Rowling’s piece this morning expanded on the horrors that she and Duffield have faced, but she also expressed her exasperations at a party that she has been part of and supported with large cash donations.
If you’d catapulted me forwards in time from 1997, the year Labour last succeeded in ending a long stretch of Tory rule, and told me their male leader would appear live on television, dictating what women were allowed to say about their own reproductive systems, I’d have had no frame of reference by which to understand what would have seemed an utterance of outright lunacy.
That was 2019, and still Starmer sits on the fence. This week he suggested that he agreed with Tony Blair – who of course won that election in 1997 – that a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis. But where does that leave transsexuals who have been through gender reassignment surgery? The Labour leader needs to point out that we all know the difference between men and women and, under his government, he will not allow those terms to be redefined by activist groups eager to use the law as a means to entrench their own ideology in public policy and discourse.
The Labour party has its roots in the trade union movement and the co-operative movement – both of which have collectivism running through their blood. Not everyone agrees with a collectivist approach to workplace bargaining and the provision of goods and services, but it is remarkable that Labour has prioritised the demands of individuals over the needs of the group. Gender identity ideology is highly individualistic – it requires that everyone else changes their way of thinking when a man declares himself to be a woman with no evidence beyond an assertion of his own feelings.
Rowling is unapologetic:
For left-leaning women like us, this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish.
This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth. It’s about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.
Starmer’s prevarication raises questions over his political nous. Women and cervixes have the potential to become a running sore for him throughout the next parliament. It is no good him moaning about the nature of the toxic debate when it comes to transgender rights, as a potential prime minister he needs to show gumption and leadership and declare what we all know to be true. Human beings can tell the difference between men and women, and no law must ever be written that attempts to deny or over-ride that evolved instinct that has served us well since the beginning of time.
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