Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why ‘progressives’ love to hate Rosie Duffield

Rosie Duffield (Getty images)

There can be a hallucinatory quality to the progressive mind, a tendency to see enemies in allies and demons in opponents, to imagine a public consensus for niche propositions and to experience even mild-mannered political disagreements as near-physical attacks. One or more of these behaviours can be found across the spectrum — lefties hate other lefties, righties hate other righties, centrists hate everyone — but it is in progressivism that they most vividly concentrate. Rosie Duffield is experiencing this phenomenon rather roughly after expressing the wrong view about that deathless fixation of a disastrously overeducated generation: gender identity. The Labour MP took issue with one of the few tweets from CNN that isn’t an update from Trump’s Amerikkka: 

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Duffield was one of many to object to how this kind of sex-neutral wordplay erases women. So much of this tedious culture war is about trivia but complicating the language around cervical cancer is pernicious. 

NHS England introduced a new HPV-focussed screening programme in December which it estimates can reduce instances of cervical cancer by a quarter. However, almost three-in-ten eligible women were not adequately screened in England in 2018/19. Communicating the importance of getting screened must be done in the plainest, simplest language possible. This is especially important among migrant women: a 2019 study found significantly lower rates of cervical screening awareness among Eastern European migrant women than native-born English women. 

Yet for pointing out that ‘only women have a cervix’, Duffield was accused of ‘transphobia’. The Labour Campaign for Trans Rights charged her with ‘den[ying] the existence of trans men and many nonbinary people’ and participating in a ‘right-wing campaign to marginalise, exclude and oppress trans people’ and said it was ‘calling on our party to take action on this incident’. A statement of simple biology is now an ‘incident’.

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