Labour has become so out of touch on sex and gender that it’s now ignoring both public opinion and the law, says Professor Jo Phoenix in the Mail. Here’s an excerpt:
I was once a member of the Labour Party – but not any more. I left in 2021, the day that David Lammy dismissed women’s rights campaigners like me as “dinosaurs… hoarding their rights”. For good measure, he claimed that men can grow a cervix.
I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right – and frankly what the vast majority of the public feels is right – that I could no longer support it.
The Supreme Court ruling should have been a wake-up call for Labour but the party has shown itself to be hopelessly out of touch once again.
The silence from the PM on such a socially transformative ruling is tin-eared enough. But now the likes of Home Office Minister Dame Angela Eagle are plotting to thwart the judgment in a cowardly WhatsApp group of Labour MPs.
Comments like hers that “some public bodies are overreacting” to the ruling are dangerous, particularly for organisations having to implement the court’s findings.
Has the British Transport Police, in announcing it would amend its strip-search guidelines, “overreacted”? Of course not, and to say so is deliberately misleading, but it shows how deep the rot has set in.
On and on this WhatsApp group goes, its members burying their heads deeper and deeper in the sand. The Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner, is branded “appalling” after she welcomed the ruling’s “clarity” in a radio interview. …
The ruling was simple: that women are a category of people who deserve respect and dignity, and trans people are a category who deserve respect and dignity. But Labour didn’t get the memo.
One day, if and when the party gets itself out of this mess, I may rejoin. But, by failing to keep up with the law, they are the ones in danger of being branded dinosaurs.
Jo Phoenix is a professor of criminology and co-founder of Open University’s Gender Critical Research Network.
Worth reading in full.
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