The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court justices’ unanimous judgment on Wednesday – confirming that ‘woman’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex – before Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour lot were out there touting their long-term advocacy of that very position. Education Secretary Bridge Phillipson even claimed in response to the ruling that: ‘We have always supported the protection of single sex spaces based on biological sex.’ But if Mr S’s memory serves correctly, that isn’t an entirely accurate reflection of history. How times change…
After all it was Phillipson herself who, when asked on Times Radio last June which bathroom a transwoman should use, replied: ‘You don’t police how people use toilets in that sense’. She went on to say that someone who had a gender recognition certificate was ‘for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender’ and concluded that: ‘I would think that in those cases people would be using female toilets’. How very curious…
But Phillipson is not the only guilty culprit. In her bid for the Labour leadership in 2020, now-Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy proclaimed: ‘I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID… I think transwomen are women.’ When Angela Rayner was standing to be deputy leader, she signed a trans rights charter that described gender-critical organisations such as Women’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as ‘trans-exclusionist hate groups’. Foreign Secretary David Lammy was asked by Nick Ferrari in 2021 whether it was ‘transphobic to say only women can have a cervix’. He replied: ‘I’m not sure it’s transphobic but it’s not accurate.’ (It may or may not be ‘transphobic’ but it is, er, entirely accurate.) The Prime Minister himself said as Labour leader in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have cervixes. Good heavens…
And spare a thought for Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Scottish Labour party. On Wednesday night, he tweeted: ‘I’ve always called for the protection of single sex spaces on the basis of biological sex.’ But Twitter users were quick to point out that Sarwar had, um, whipped his MSPs to vote for the SNP’s controversial gender bill. As the gender ideology it hitched itself to implodes, the wisest thing Labour could do is change its pronouns to ‘no/comment’…
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