Rosie Duffield has been, consistently, the one Labour MP who understands the dangers of gender ideology and is prepared to speak out against it. So, of course, she's in trouble:
The Labour MP Rosie Duffield is being investigated by her party for liking a tweet which it claims is antisemitic, but allies fear she is being targeted because of her views on transgender issues.
The MP for Canterbury, who has previously claimed she has been ostracised by Sir Keir Starmer and the party for her beliefs about women’s rights, is currently not on the party’s approved list of candidates to stand at the next general election.
She was branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix” and campaigned against people with male genitalia who identify as women being allowed to enter female-only spaces such as changing rooms. Her stance has won her support from the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, with whom Duffield is now friends.
Despite being selected to fight her marginal seat last year, Duffield, 52, has been omitted from the official list held by the party’s ruling national executive committee because she is facing a disciplinary investigation by Labour’s governance and legal unit.
Insiders claim that an investigation was launched into her conduct at the end of March after she liked a tweet by the Father Ted comedy writer Graham Linehan.
He was responding to a tweet by the comedian Eddie Izzard who wrote: “I’m a trans superhero — but if I’d lived in Nazi Germany I’d have been murdered for it.”
Linehan responded: “Ah, yes, the Nazis, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair.” Duffield liked Linehan’s response, which immediately triggered a furious backlash led by LGBT Labour, a campaign group, and Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at the left-wing media platform Novara Media.
Sarkar tweeted to her 400,000-plus followers: “This is Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, liking a tweet that contains Holocaust revisionism. Trans people and gay people were sent to die in concentration camps by the Nazis. This is a historical fact, and it is disgusting that a sitting Labour MP would approve of its denial.”
Within days of liking the tweet, Duffield, who is a vice-chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, was asked to “unlike” it by her whip, Chris Elmore.
She is understood to have agreed to the request, while continuing to deny the tweet was antisemitic, explaining that Linehan had been sarcastically mocking Izzard’s comment identifying with the victims of the genocide of Jews, despite belonging to none of the identities targeted by the Nazis.
Supporters of the MP, who won her Canterbury seat after more than 100 years of Tory rule, claim that it is factually incorrect that trans people were a target of the Holocaust, and that the transgender victims and survivors were persecuted because of their sexual orientation, not their gender identity.
They also believe that there was a concerted campaign whipped up by LGBT Labour to weaponise the tweet because of their opposition to Duffield’s gender-critical views.
One source said: “They have made a cynical calculation that complaints of antisemitism are more likely to result in action being taken against her than complaints about her gender-critical views, especially now they are party policy.”
Lord Austin of Dudley, a former Labour MP who resigned from the party over antisemitism while Jeremy Corbyn was leader in 2019, described the investigation into Duffield as “madness”.
He said: “There are very few MPs who have fought antisemitism as strongly and as consistently as Rosie Duffield. She is one of the very few MPs who turned up and showed her support for the ‘enough is enough’ demonstration against antisemitism in 2018 and has consistently opposed antisemitism ever since.”
To accuse Duffield of antisemitism while great swathes of the Labour Party are out marching in support of Hamas takes some…well, takes some chutzpah.
Update:
This story makes me so angry. As editor of @JewishChron I spent the years after Corbyn became Labour leader fighting the party’s antisemitism. Most Labour MPs were either complicit in it or said nothing to upset party members. @RosieDuffield1 was one of the very few who refused… pic.twitter.com/r03v0pAARr
— Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) November 26, 2023
Mick Hartley 
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