Labour politicians who cannot give straight answers on sex and gender will need to get their thinking caps on, assuming they find themselves in charge on Friday morning. The ‘what is a woman?’ question was just the start. The debate that has now moved on to toilets – and Labour needs to come up with some answers and fast.
Last week Bridget Phillipson was put on the spot; yesterday it was Jonathan Ashworth; today it was Keir Starmer. For a journalist, this is easy meat. The warm up is optional, ‘Do you think that women have a right to single-sex spaces, and will you uphold the Equality Act that protects the single-sex exceptions?’ Who is going to say no to that, after all.
But then comes the question that floored Ashworth, ‘A trans woman, in a restaurant that only has a man and a woman’s toilet facilities, which does she use?’
'A trans woman in a restaurant that only has a man and a woman's toilet facilities, which does she use?'
— LBC (@LBC) July 1, 2024
'I'm not a toilet monitor.'
Jonathan Ashworth is the latest Labour politician to be asked by @NickFerrariLBC about the party's stance on gender identity. pic.twitter.com/mJ34b30QnW
After swiftly eschewing the post of toilet monitor general, the shadow paymaster general floundered. It’s an easy question, but hard to answer because the issues – and the consequences – are clear to everyone listening. The ‘what is a woman’ question has been problematic for Labour, but that can at least be steered into a philosophical ramble until the questioner decides they need to move on.
Not the toilet question – that is a simple binary. Transwoman? Men’s or women’s? Unlike prisons, hospitals or even sport, public toilets involve most people most days when they are away from home for the day. A rambling non-answer will not pass muster and even the most cloth headed politician must know that. Obfuscation with the suggestion that it might ‘depend’ only delays the inevitable. Eventually the question ends up in as a clear binary, perhaps only minutes after the minister or whoever has promised to uphold the Equality Act with apparent sincerity,
‘Minister, you have said that you are going to uphold the women’s right to all-female spaces and all-female services. Will you now defend those women’s right to say no to every male transsexual?’
During the blathering that will likely ensue, the hapless interviewee can then be skewered by the follow-up, ‘and will you allow those women to use the law to deal with male transsexuals who would not take “no” for an answer’.
This is not how it was supposed to turn out when demands for self-identification were first made in 2015. Self-ID seemed such an easy win for socially liberal politicians. But they chose to overlook the need for safeguards, and ignored the most basic of reasoning. They forgot that if the law allowed any man to inherit the rights of women simply by signing a statutory declaration, then the process would be left wide open to abuse. With Self-ID, women would suffer, and as it undermined confidence in the legal process, so would male transsexuals who had been quietly using women’s spaces for years – sometimes without ever being noticed. In the end it didn’t even take a change in the law for the idea of Self-ID to do its damage. The social agreement about toilets – if that’s what it was – was based not on pieces of paper but on trust and confidence. That has been shattered and eight years later the grilling of Ashworth is the result.
Politically, there is a simple answer. As a male transsexual who does not use women’s spaces – including toilets – I know that there is often a third option. The new government must defend the concept of single-sex spaces, but at the same time encourage further provision of alternative individual unisex spaces for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex.
That will likely be deeply unpopular with the LGBTQ+ brigade but it may also draw criticism from some ‘gender critical’ campaigners who think that male transsexuals should use the men’s and be done with it. That approach might sound good on the internet, but in real life where bodies are involved it has the potential to cause a new set of problems, especially if those bodies have been chemically and surgically altered to resemble the opposite sex.
But when the only real choice is between upsetting one side of a very passionate debate or disappointing both sides, the latter might at least bring some closure to a row that will otherwise end up dominating every interview. Human nature being what it is, we are more likely to accept not getting everything we want if at the same time our opponents suffer similar disappointment. Cynical? Perhaps, but politics is a cynical game at times and in the coming years Ashworth and co. might need to take whatever solutions they can get.
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