Rumours are swirling that Harriet Harman, who is retiring as an MP, is set to be appointed as the new Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), replacing the sensible Baroness Falkner. The Telegraph‘s Tom Harris has more.
This will be unwelcome news indeed for feminists who have been campaigning to protect women’s rights to privacy and safety. Harman has long been an advocate of Stonewall ideology that holds that “trans women are women”.
It’s a controversy that Labour would much prefer not to have been raised at all, and, lest we forget, it wouldn’t have been had it not been for the efforts of the likes of author J.K. Rowling – a former Labour supporter and donor – and the party’s own candidate in the marginal seat of Canterbury, Rosie Duffield.
The latest Labour frontbencher to become irritated at journalists’ inexplicable tendency to dare to pose the question about trans rights versus women’s rights was the party’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden, who is normally one of the party’s most thoughtful and effective communicators. But asked whether trans women would continue to be able to use women-only spaces under a Labour Government, McFadden became irritated that the question was even being asked (which itself answers the question).
He resorted, as so many politicians do as an alternative strategy to actually taking a side, to his leader’s universal get-out. McFadden said: “For people going through this [transition] let’s act with a bit of kindness rather than using them as some kind of ‘gotcha’ question in an interview all the time.”
Isn’t it odd how, when pressed, certain politicians always – on every single occasion – demand understanding and sympathy, not with the women who are genuinely fearful of incursions into their private spaces and the genuine threat to their personal safety, but to the men who pose that threat?
And so to Harman’s rumoured elevation to head the EHRC when the term of the current chair, Baroness Falkner of Margravine, comes to an end in November. If Prime Minister Starmer goes ahead with Harman’s appointment rather than offers Falkner a second term, it will be a body blow to women’s rights campaigners; Falkner has earned the wrath of the trans industry by advising the Government to toughen protection for biological women’s spaces, even being forced to defend herself from allegations of bullying, which her allies maintain was nothing more than a witch hunt by trans “allies”.
Harman, on the other hand, has long been a “trans ally” herself. She was the architect of the Equality Act, which first established gender transition as a “protected characteristic” in law and critics fear her appointment would result in the continuation, or even extension, of Stonewall’s influence throughout Whitehall. …
No doubt Starmer would have preferred the prospect of Harman becoming head of the EHRC not to have emerged this side of polling day, although with only a day to go it’s unlikely to change many people’s minds about who they’ll vote for. He should understand that whether or not this appointment is made, everything his Government says and does on women’s rights will be analysed closely and appropriately critiqued.
Worth reading in full.
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