Mick Hartley

Turning Labour round on the trans debate is not going to be easy. Jo Bartosch in the Telegraph on a particularly unpleasant case:

Labour’s Tim Roca must surely be one [of] the Opposition’s favourite politicians. In newly surfaced footage, a University of Westminster event titled Queering Academia the Macclesfield MP told an audience that “transphobes” are “swivel-eyed” and “not very well people.”

Let’s be clear: by “transphobes” Roca doesn’t mean violent thugs who want to crucify cross dressers. He means you. He means the average British voter who believes that biological sex exists. The parents alarmed that teachers are telling their daughters they are “born in the wrong body” if they like playing with trucks. The people campaigning to stop male sex offenders from being housed in female prisons. The detransitioners left scarred by medical experiments masquerading as care. He means the Supreme Court justices who recently reaffirmed that, under equality law, sex means biology, a decision he decried as “depressing.”

To Roca, all of them – all of us – are unhinged.

But what’s truly depressing is that Parliament is still stacked with unabashed gender goons like Roca, who confuse sneering for superiority and ideology for intellect.

The Labour Party has become a refuge for some of the most absurd and extreme statements ever uttered into a microphone. Dawn Butler once bafflingly informed a Pink News audience that “babies are born without a sex” and that “90 per cent of giraffes are gay.” Stella Creasy earnestly believes that being a feminist means affirming “women with penises.” And Labour’s health minister Ashley Dalton once tweeted that people should be able to identify as llamas if they wish….But what’s most infuriating about Roca’s smug sermon is his deluded belief that all that’s needed is “robust conversation” to “bring people around” to his view that gender identity ought to outweigh the reality of biological sex.

For a decade, gender lobbyists like Stonewall shut down debate, smeared dissenters as bigots, and undermined the democratic process by influencing public policy behind closed doors. When we wanted dialogue, they called it hate. Women trying to arrange discussions about now shelved proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act faced bomb threats and intimidation from activists, and arrest and interrogation from Stonewall trained police forces.

Thanks to their work, common sense has resurfaced, and it is sweeping through the nation. The public can see clearly who the real “swivel-eyed” loons are: those who lock male rapists in women’s prisons, who drug confused children, and earnestly believe you can be born in the wrong body.

Roca is half-right: there are some very unwell people in this maddening debate, and many of them share the green benches he sits on.

What Labour needs from Starmer is an unequivocal commitment to rooting out gender ideology in the same way he committed the party to rooting out antisemitism. We'll see….