Mick Hartley

A good piece from Janice Turner in the Times (£) – Labour’s trans pledge turns into a witch-hunt:

Lisa Nandy brands herself as Labour’s truth-speaker. Rational, grounded, fearless of factions, the only leadership candidate prepared to tackle the self-delusion and disconnection that lost four elections, she’d won many prospective votes, including mine. Until Tuesday, when Nandy signed up to a witch-hunt of thousands of (mainly female) party members, including me.

The Labour trans pledge is an astonishingly authoritarian document. It not only demands signatories “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” but says anyone who disagrees is a bigot. It names Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups” whose supporters are transphobic and must therefore be expelled. Even though these were set up chiefly to defend women’s single-sex spaces enshrined in Labour’s 2010 Equality Act and upheld in the party’s manifesto last year.

So calm, thoughtful, unite-the-party Lisa Nandy wants to expel supporters of the very platform on which she was just re-elected!…

I mention Nandy because although every leadership candidate except Sir Keir Starmer has signed this pledge, she has doubled down. There are no spaces at all, she said on Radio 4’s Today programme, where male-bodied people should be excluded. She likened the debate over women’s refuges to fights between Eritrean and Ethiopian boys when she worked at a Centrepoint homeless shelter: ie a woman and any male who self-identifies as a woman are materially the same and must be treated as such.

Nandy is not the first politician who, sucked into the gender vortex, loses all reason. This week the Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle confounded biologists by saying that “sex is not binary”. During the election the Lib Dem Sarah Wollaston denied that a baby’s biological sex is observed at birth; the potential Lib Dem leader Layla Moran believes women can differentiate male predators from self-identified trans women by looking into their souls….

How have LGBT issues, in particular gender self-ID, become such a moral test of politicians in progressive parties? Sociologists speak of how organisations can be overwhelmed by “purity spirals”. This is when a group grades its members by a single value, which has no upper limit or agreed interpretation. Those who seek power must demonstrate their purity in ever more abstruse ways: those judged impure are denounced and destroyed….

The trans issue, specifically gender self-ID, is the purity spiral du jour. The Labour trans pledge transformed the leadership election from a civil, even dull contest, in which feminists felt they had a choice, into a grim, least-worst-option scenario. Every candidate has recited the catechism “trans women are women”, leaving members to assess whether they mean it literally, like Nandy, so single-sex exemptions are toast, or as an assertion of existing legal rights of trans women to be recognised as women, in most circumstances, which no one would dispute….

So why are they submitting to this test? Because progressive politicians’ fear of being “on the wrong side of history” trumps all sense. Gender self-ID is constantly presented as the new gay rights. Yet gay men and lesbians only demanded to love freely. They did not materially encroach on any other group. Most trans folk, who simply wish to live without discrimination or violence, are horrified by activists who demand in their name that women surrender hard-won rights.

Drafting the Labour manifesto, Lachlan Stuart observed that LGBT activists were not “driven by a motivation to improve the quality of life for trans people”, such as better mental and physical health care, only “to erode or erase the political rights of female people”. Their alarming central goal was a total end to women’s single-sex spaces. How will voters, hitherto unaware of this arcane debate, feel about a Labour leader committed to ending historic safeguards? About a party which believes any male should be allowed to legally change sex without qualification or checks, leaving women and girls vulnerable yet unable to object? Will Labour leaders pull out of the purity spiral and heed the fears of thousands of women members? Or will they, as that nice Lisa Nandy demands, simply chuck them out?

See also this letter to Nandy from Ruth Serwotka, a co-founder of Woman's Place UK.

Given the furore that followed your comments, I hope it is not lost on you, or on any of the other leadership candidates, that your views are out of step with huge numbers of women in the Party. We are fed up with how remote so many of you are from our lives.

I hope it is clear that we will not accept being thrown as red meat to self-appointed groups, formed overnight in the recesses of the internet, whipped up by irresponsible media figures but in fact representing little in real life.

Has the real life general election result taught the Party nothing?