Labour women betray their feminist forebears

What is it with Labour and women? The party, which unlike the Tories, Lib Dems, SNP, DUP, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru and even the Greens, has never elected a female leader, seems to be struggling even to define what a woman is.

First, Labour’s equalities spokesman Anneliese Dodds tied herself in knots when challenged, on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, for a definition. “It depends on the context,” she offered.

Then, on Wednesday, the usually sensible Yvette Cooper, Shadow Home Secretary, refused three times to define the word. “I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” she said during an interview on Times Radio.

Joining the confusion on Thursday, another Labour stalwart, Baroness Helena Kennedy, launching her working group’s recommendations on misogyny, declared, when asked for her definition of a woman: “I’m not going to get into that horrible, polarised debate.”

For women who support Labour and trust the party to safeguard their hard-won rights, this reticence among such female firebrands to give them a name must come as a shock, despite the backdrop of increasingly bitter transgender politics.

How can Kennedy address the very pressing matter of misogyny (definition: hatred of women) if she can’t say what a woman is? How can Dodds fight women’s corner as the shadow minister for women if she doesn’t know what a woman is? And how can Cooper, who was once a credible leadership contender, duck out of discussing an issue — that is, being a woman — that concerns 50 per cent of the population?

Following Dodds’ remarks, JK Rowling accused the MP of cowardice, suggesting she get a dictionary and a backbone. The same charge could be levelled at both Cooper and Kennedy who, as educated women with all life’s advantages, should be ashamed of themselves for shirking their responsibilities towards their sisters.

This is by no means the first time Labour has embarrassed itself over the “horrible, polarised debate” on women’s rights, trans activism and whether men who decide that their gender is female can be described as women.

Last autumn, Party leader Keir Starmer, desperate not to enrage activists on the Left, said that his colleague Rosie Duffield (hounded by trans zealots) was wrong to say only women have a cervix.

Duffield was forced to stay away from the Labour Party conference in Brighton after being threatened over her transgender stance — that people born male but self-identifying as female should not have access to single-sex spaces such as refuges for rape victims, changing rooms and prisons. Duffield is now considering leaving the party over what she described as “obsessive harassment” within its ranks.

Labour is not the only political party to get bogged down in the gender minefield. In Scotland, the SNP government is driving through changes to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill that will enable people to change their sex without a medical diagnosis.

Introducing the proposed amendments in the Scottish parliament, Social Justice Secretary Shona Robison — who had clearly forgotten about Sarah Everard — said there was no evidence that “predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour”.

This prompted howls of outrage from women, including those abused by predatory men posing as family friends or pillars of the community. But from Robison’s SNP chums, Nicola Sturgeon among them, there was silence.

Gender recognition reform has been dropped by Westminster, but Labour, if ever in power again, would follow Scotland’s path. With the gender question high up on its policy agenda, it is surely not demanding too much of the party that it talks about women openly, to try to allay their legitimate fears that their rights are being eroded.

Although there will always be elements of bigotry in Britain, I believe most people in this country support an individual’s desire to be who they want to be. Tolerance towards the tiny trans community, which is protected by law against discrimination, has been a given.

But it is mystifying to the majority how fast the aggressive trans activist lobby has captured so much of the political mindset. What is particularly incomprehensible is the cancellation of the biologically female sex, to the point where the word “woman” — and “mother” — cannot be uttered in the vicinity of any left-leaning politician.

Rowling, a long-time Labour supporter and donor, tweeted after Dodds’ radio appearance on International Women’s Day: “Apparently, under a Labour government, today will become We Who Must Not Be Named Day.”

The Harry Potter author speaks for women, from all sides of the political spectrum, who feel their voices have been drowned out by shouty, often male, trans rights extremists.

Defending women and their place in society has long been a role embraced by left-wing feminists, but these brave women’s legacy is being trashed by today’s feeble generation of trans movement torchbearers.

As usual, the poorer, least privileged women will bear the brunt of a culture that prioritises the whims of a few, over the rights of the masses.

Veteran Labour parliamentarian Harriet Harman said this week that her party still has “a way to go until women are really on equal terms”.

Sadly, they never will be as the baton passes from her brand of feminist fighters to the likes of Cooper and Dodds.