Mick Hartley

The Labour leadership contenders – well, Long-Bailey and Nandy – are doubling down on their ill-advised trans claims:

Lisa Nandy has said that trans prisoners, including those convicted of serious sexual offences, should be held in jails that match their chosen gender.

The Labour leadership candidate told a hustings event yesterday that inmates who self-identify, such as Zoe Lynes, a convicted child rapist who now identifies as a woman, should have their crimes recorded as being committed by their preferred gender. Lynes, who was previously known as Christopher Worton, was sent to a youth detention centre in 2014 after pleading guilty to five charges of rape against a child aged 13 to 15. Ms Nandy, 40, told the audience: “I believe fundamentally in people’s right to self-ID. I believe the gender recognition act strikes the wrong balance in relation to that.

“Crimes that are recorded should be recorded as that person wishes having gone through that process.”

She added: “Trans women are women and trans men are men and should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.”

It comes after Rebecca Long Bailey, 40, one of her rivals for the Labour leadership, said that equality law should be changed to give trans people a legal right to enter women-only spaces.

She claimed that the proposal did not threaten women’s rights, as some feminist campaigners maintain. She insisted “there doesn’t need to be differentiation between women’s rights and trans rights”.

Under the Equality Act 2010, trans people are not legally entitled to use single-sex spaces such as women-only lavatories, changing rooms, hospital wards and refuges.

Asked if she wanted to change that law, Ms Long Bailey told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One: “I do and I want a right to self-ID for trans people.”

A policy of self-identification would allow trans people legally to declare their preferred gender without requiring medical certification.

It's a race to the bottom.

Just by saying “there doesn’t need to be differentiation between women’s rights and trans rights” doesn't make it true. That's what all the fuss is about, from the LGB Alliance, from Woman's Place UK, from feminist campaigners. Women who've worked so hard over the years for women-only safe spaces can't just be dismissed for the sake of a cheap supposedly "progressive" sound-bite. Never mind the basic biology…