Mick Hartley

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph on the lamentable Lisa Nandy and her latest trans plea:

Lisa Nandy should surely have taken the hint when, having worn a “protect the dolls” T-shirt on a transgender rights march in August, she found herself roundly eviscerated.

Dolls, a slang term from the 1980s for men trying to pass themselves off as women, had long been viewed as misogynistic, a description that succeeded only in objectifying femininity. Except now the Culture Secretary has gone a step further, making the fatuous suggestion at this week’s Labour Party conference that biological men should still be allowed to compete in certain women’s sports.

“There are three things that we’re trying to achieve,” she said on Wednesday. “The first is inclusion, the second is fairness, and the third is safety. And there are some sports where it’s perfectly possible to include everybody and still meet those principles around fairness and safety.”

The instinctive reaction to these remarks is to despair that somebody so oblivious to the reality of sex, and to why immutable male advantage means that the integrity of the women’s category in sport must always be protected, could have been elevated to an office of state. It is as if this year’s Supreme Court verdict never happened.…

Nandy similarly seems beholden to an ideology that people compete in sport with their feelings rather than their bodies. Why else would she say that “we need to make sure that we put as much energy and ambition into competitions that the trans community can participate in fully as we do into all the others”? The message is that a minority of men craving affirmation as women matter to her more than half the population. That is a betrayal of her own sex, a point made to her by eminent former sportswomen in no uncertain terms.

“Inexcusable,” said Sharron Davies of Nandy’s latest statement. “Women’s sport is not a consolation prize for non-conforming males. Women’s sport belongs solely to females.” Tracy Edwards, the round-the-world yachtswoman, said: “It is beyond depressing that we finally have so many women in government and most of them don’t know what a woman is.”

Or, as shadow equalities minister Claire Coutinho put it:

“Time and again, Labour has sided with radical trans activists instead of the women fighting to protect their changing rooms and toilets from biological men. Labour cannot be trusted to protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of women and girls.”