Starmer is as bad as Inside Higher Ed.

Keir Starmer is taking women for fools. He imagines he’s solved the contentious question of how to protect women’s rights while meeting the demands of gender dysphoric men and trans rights activists with his ingenious formulation: 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis. That, he thinks, will reassure anxious floating voters and get his new target, Stevenage Woman, on side. Of course, he tells us, incredulous that anyone should suppose a sensible person like him would believe anything else, being a woman is biological. Well, mostly. Until it isn’t. There is the little matter of that 0.1 per cent.

If 0.1 percent can then any percent can. If you say it’s real but very very rare, it’s the “it’s real” part that counts. It doesn’t matter how rare it is, because there is no criterion for it and anyone can claim it and by god a lot of anyones are doing exactly that. How stupid or oblivious do you have to be not to get that?

And with that declaration Sir Keir abandons all safeguarding and flings the door of women’s spaces, sports, showers, jails, awards and intimate care needs wide open to every male who fancies walking through it. If some women have a penis, and any man can self-identify as a woman, which is Labour’s policy, then women lose all privacy, rights and protections. Some 48,000 men identify as trans women. It is impossible for women to distinguish between the genuinely dysphoric men who just wish to live peacefully as women, and men with bad intent. There is no marker. Voyeurs, exhibitionists, sexual fetishists, predators and men who enjoy making women uneasy and humiliated have the right to enter any female space once sex segregation has been abandoned.

Exactly. Round of applause for Jenni Russell.

This is wilful ignorance. There’s no “somehow” or “could” about the rolling back of women’s rights. It’s already a reality, one that huge numbers of women are frightened and furious about. Sir Keir could take a look at the 2,500 livid comments under his Sunday Times piece. Schools are forcing girls to use unisex loos where boys photograph them under the partitions, break open the doors or harass them by listening for the crackle of sanitary products, leaving girls too scared to use lavatories during the day. Women are being described by the NHS as “menstruators” and “uterus-havers”. A handful of rapists and male murderers have been placed in women’s jails. So many male sex offenders are claiming to be female that ministry of justice figures show trans women appear five times as likely to commit these crimes as men.

Starmer has no excuse for ignoring this.