Mick Hartley

JK Rowling is rolling her sleeves up and getting stuck in:

The author JK Rowling has heavily criticised the Labour leader after he waded into the debate about how his party defines what a woman is.

Sir Keir Starmer went further than his frontbench colleagues Yvette Cooper and Anneliese Dodds by insisting “trans women are women” and called for a “respectful” debate on the issue.

Asked to define a woman, the Labour leader told The Times: “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law.”

The Harry Potter author condemned his comments on Twitter, claiming the party could “no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights”. She also criticised him for “publicly misrepresenting” the 2010 Equality Act, which legally protects people from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society, and said women’s anger was “growing”.

Rowling, 56, wrote: “I don’t think our politicians have the slightest idea how much anger is building among women from all walks of life at the attempts to threaten and intimidate them out of speaking publicly about their own rights, their own bodies and their own lives.

“Among the thousands of letters and emails I’ve received are disillusioned members of Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems and the SNP. Women are scared, outraged and angry at the deaf ear turned to their well-founded concerns. But women are organising.

“Now Keir Starmer publicly misrepresents equalities law, in yet another indication that the Labour Party can no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights. But I repeat: women are organising across party lines, and their resolve and their anger are growing.” Rowling claimed she has been inundated with messages from women and said lesbians were also coming under attack for “not wishing to be redefined”.

She added: “Innumerable gay people have been in touch with me to say exactly this. Like women, they — especially lesbians — are under attack for not wishing to be redefined and for refusing to use ideological language they find offensive.”…

Earlier this week shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper refused three times to offer a definition of a woman, saying she was not going to go down a “rabbit hole”.

Her colleague Anneliese Dodds, who is Labour’s equalities spokeswoman, had already said the day before that the meaning of the word depended on “context”.

Her stance also angered Rowling, who said that she needed both a dictionary and a backbone.

Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, said there was a “lot of anger” about the Labour leader’s comments and she had contacted him directly yesterday.

She said: “These decisions on policy seem to be being taken by fairly young London men mostly that make up the leader of the opposition’s office.

“To not be able to say what a woman is, is frankly some kind of parody.”

Duffield has previously said she found it tempting to defect to the Conservative Party over disagreements over transgender rights.

“These decisions on policy seem to be being taken by fairly young London men.."I can believe that.

Again with the Times, and any article dealing with trans matters,  "Comments for this article have been turned off".

Their leading article on the subject is uncompromising, though – Labour’s depressing fudge on trans issues satisfies no one:

Asked to define a woman on Radio 4 last Tuesday, the shadow equalities minister Anneliese Dodds blathered inconclusively before saying it depended on the “context”. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, then appeared on Times Radio and refused three times to offer a definition, saying she was not going to go down a “rabbit hole”.

Their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, finally stepped forward with a partial clarification. “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that, trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law,” he said. Starmer went on to call for reform of the Gender Recognition Act, under which people diagnosed with gender dysphoria who have lived in their acquired gender for at least two years can apply to be legally recognised. Starmer suggested the process needed to give them more “respect and dignity”. He also said he believed in safe spaces for women. It is difficult to square a softening of the rules on self-identification with preserving single-sex spaces.

Labour’s muddle on gender is partly a function of cowardice in the face of thuggishness from the fringes of the trans community. Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury who is a domestic abuse survivor, said she felt unable to attend the party’s annual conference last year because of her views. And it is partly a reflection of Labour’s desire to appease its left-wing members, who feel more strongly about trans issues than the wider public, while not putting off swing voters.

The result is a depressing fudge that pleases no one. If Starmer and co had wanted to celebrate International Women’s Day with conviction — the purpose of Dodds’s interview on Tuesday — they would have had the guts to say what most people see as blindingly obvious. Biological sex is a fact, not a feeling.

Again, comments turned off.

The Times is perhaps the paper with the best record on reporting critically on trans issues – which makes it even more depressing and inexplicable that they're pursuing this silencing of comments policy.