Mick Hartley

Keir Starmer's position on conversion therapy depends very much on which way the wind's blowing, and who he's talking to. After a brief flirtation with a gender-critical position after that seemed to gaining the upper hand with the public, he now seems back on track with his LGBT chums. Well, the Ts anyway. Joan Smith at UnHerd:

How will a Labour government handle the conflict between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists? Optimists believe that the party has rowed back from an extreme position on gender ideology, but gender-critical women’s organisations and even some of his own MPs struggle to get a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer.

Not so trans activists, for whom Starmer apparently has all the time in the world. This week he welcomed members of the lobby group LGBT+ Labour to a reception at Westminster and offered them everything the most dedicated trans activist could want, short of self-ID. Starmer was accompanied by a raft of frontbenchers including his deputy, Angela Rayner, and the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Anneliese Dodds.

“Together we’ll ban conversion therapy, strengthen hate crime laws and tackle health inequalities,” Dodds posted excitedly on X.

The big question, of course, is what do they mean by conversion therapy. Does that include "gender identity"? It appears that it does.

Banning “trans conversion therapy” has become an article of faith for leading Labour figures, even though they are strangely reluctant to tell us what exactly it is and how often it is happening. They have been warned repeatedly that a ban risks criminalising parents and counsellors who take a cautious approach to children expressing unhappiness with their sex, but they don’t listen.

The assumption behind all this talk – that there are trans children just as there are gay children – is a disastrous misunderstanding, fostered by groups like Stonewall. Children who claim to be trans, to have a gender identity different from their "gender assigned at birth", need to be talked with, allowed time to grow through puberty without irreversible medical intervention. But that's precisely what the trans activists are calling "conversion therapy".

It must be galling for Labour MPs such as Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly targeted by LGBT+ Labour, to see the party’s leading figures palling up to its members. Starmer has not spoken to Duffield for more than two years, leaving her to cope unsupported with endless smears and demands that she should lose the Labour whip. He is evidently more comfortable with the widely-ridiculed MP for Jarrow, Kate Osborne, who was at the reception despite having boasted on X about her delusion that some women have a penis.

It speaks volumes about the state of Labour that these are the people — reality-deniers and lobby groups who try to silence gender-critical MPs — that leading figures want to impress. It’s not unheard of for politicians to tailor their policies to their audience, but the pattern is clear. Each apparent lurch towards reality by Labour frontbenchers is followed by a capitulation to trans activism.

That’s bad enough, but the general election is going to bring about an influx of Labour MPs who are signed up to all the nonsense about pronouns and gender identity. Labour’s woman problem hasn’t gone away, and the party’s leading figures don’t even bother to hide it.

It's not a happy prospect.