The staggers
Ben Bradshaw’s grotesque waving away of femicide is from a New Statesman interview with Rosie Duffield.
For at least half a decade now, Labour, like many political parties in the West, has struggled with the contentious issue of “self-ID” – the proposed right of people to self-identity as another sex or gender.
Notice a funny thing about this. The word or label “self-ID” doesn’t literally mean to self-identity as another sex or gender. It just means [the right to] self-identify. We’re given a translation that claims it means [only] to self-identify as another sex or gender. Not, you see, to self-identify as an animal or a tree or a building or a planet – just as another sex or gender. Well what does that tell you? That self-identifying as something you’re not is, in every other context, just an absurdity, or a game. It tells you that everyone knows that self-identifying as something is not magic and does not make you that something unless you already are it. It gives the game away – “We all know that you can’t really do this, but we’ve decided to humor this one category of people who pretend you can.”
Some Labour members and voters, and an undetermined number of the party’s MPs, think that self-ID threatens the rights of women to single-sex spaces. The most prominent critic of the idea within the party is Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury since 2017.
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Why is the subject so fraught? For Duffield, who lived through the fights within Labour over Brexit and anti-Semitism, “this is the only issue I’ve been involved in where there is no attempt at collegiate discussion. It’s so divided.” Any fence-sitting by Starmer, she believes, is only going to alienate both sides.
Ben Bradshaw, a fellow Labour MP and the former culture secretary, is a public critic of Duffield’s. He pushed back against some of her views when we spoke. “Ireland already has self-ID, of course, as do a growing number of European countries. So I think the tide of history is going steadily in one direction,” he argues.
“As far as I’m concerned, Labour’s position is absolutely clear and should not be controversial,” Bradshaw continues, “which is that we favour reforming the gender recognition process to demedicalise it, to reduce the degrading treatment that trans people who want to transition need to go through. We believe there’s absolutely no conflict between trans rights and the protection of safe spaces under the Equality Act.” Bradshaw believes this is “certainly Keir’s position” and the position of most Labour MPs.
I put the polling data to him. “Of course public opinion in a democracy matters,” he says. “But if governments had always only been guided by public opinion, we wouldn’t have had any of the social advances in this country.”
Nimble footwork. One minute “we believe,” next minute “never mind what most of us believe.” The tide of history is with us, also ignore public opinion.
The complacent waving away of the thousands of women killed every year is the next paragraph.
But transitioning – assuming he means physical rather than social – is wholly medical in nature, from start to finish. The process unavoidably requires surgery and hormone replacement obviously, but even before you get to that point, the whole thing starts with the a psychological problem: distress at the sexed anatomy of one’s own body. I can’t see a single point along the course of this phenomenon that doesn’t have at least some input that is medical in nature.
Sure, but now some people are saying you don’t need to do anything to be a woman except say you’re a woman. So they don’t have to go through surgeries. Neat, isn’t it? You can keep your male privilege, because everyone will see you are a male. But if you want to call yourself Sally, you can go in the women’s spaces. And even if you don’t want to call yourself Sally, but want to stay Joe.
“We believe there’s absolutely no conflict between trans rights and the protection of safe spaces under the Equality Act.” If transwomen aren’t allowed in women’s single sex spaces, competitions, honors, opportunities, etc., if no crime victim has to describe their assailant with female pronouns, if discrimination against transwomen means they can’t be treated differently just because they are trans, not that they have to be treated like they are women, I think most people, and most women, wouldn’t care.