Mick Hartley

Iain Macwhirter in the Times – Labour is desperately backtracking from this self-ID mess

It was the most extraordinary case of policy capture in the history of devolution. A handful of Scottish government-funded trans charities, backed by the LGBT lobby group Stonewall, managed to persuade Scottish political parties, the civil service, the NHS and much of the media that humans can change sex simply by an act of the imagination.

Trans women are women, intoned the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Get over it. Biology is for the birds. Women aren’t women any more, they’re “menstruators” or “people with cervixes”, said the NHS, since people with penises had now to be regarded as female. Anyone who disagreed was a “transphobe” and likened to racists by Sturgeon. There was to be “no debate”.

Scottish Labour, under Anas Sarwar, backed all this. And then along came rapist "Isla Bryson", and the whole house of cards collapsed. 

After a brief period of woke confusion on trans rights, Starmer has finally woken up to the danger that self-ID poses to his attempt to reach No 10. He echoes the gender-critical slogan that a “woman is an adult female” a dictionary definition that had been regarded as transphobic by the SNP leadership. Starmer knows whose side voters are on.

The Scottish Labour leader does too. Sarwar says he no longer supports the bill in its present form. “We still have work to do to make sure we are protecting single sex spaces” he said last week, “based on biological sex”. This recognition of biological reality is welcome, if belated. Had he wanted to protect women from trans sex offenders, why did the Scottish Labour leader whip his MSPs to vote for this deeply flawed SNP bill in the first place?

The absurdity of self-ID should have been obvious to anyone. Yet it wasn’t until the presence of sex offenders in women’s prisons caused a public outcry that the “trans women are women” dogma was questioned. Why did the Scottish political classes ever subscribe to this belief? It was because the same activists, backed by intellectuals and politicians who should have known better, managed to impose an omerta on public debate on biological sex and the impact on women’s sex-based rights of its abandonment.