Joan Smith at UnHerd - Gender ideologues have captured the Labour party conference:
Are feminists welcome in the Labour Party? I mean the old-fashioned kind of feminist, who knows the difference between men and women. The answer appears to be that we’re not. Delegates to this year’s party conference in Liverpool will be able to browse stalls outside the main hall, talking to activists about everything from climate change to animal welfare. What they won’t be able to do is speak to representatives of the Labour Women’s Declaration, an organisation that advocates for women’s sex-based rights and single-sex spaces. It has been denied a stall at conference along with FiLiA, which last year organised the largest feminist conference in this country for decades.
The party claims the decision was taken on commercial grounds, which makes no sense at all; both organisations offered to pay the going rate for a stall and said they were flexible about size and position. Rates are advertised on the party’s website, which boasts that “exhibiting at our Conference is a unique opportunity to increase awareness of your aims and objectives to a wider audience and reach influential groups of people”. Not, however, if your aim is to defend the fact that human beings can’t change sex.
Starmer, like so many others who aren't interested in confronting the issue, has taken it as received truth that gender ideology and trans activists are somehow progressive, and therefore to be supported by all nice well-meaning people.
Women hoping for an unequivocal statement from Sir Keir Starmer about our right to speak openly about biological sex will be disappointed. The Labour leader has repeatedly failed to condemn harassment of feminists in the party, who have been targeted by “pledges” and motions threatening “transphobes” with expulsion. Instead of standing up for free speech and women’s rights, as you might expect a former Director of Public Prosecutions to do, Starmer has proved himself anything but an ally. “Trans women are women,” he intones, holding to this line as firmly as devout Catholics preach transubstantiation.
Here is the result: with the eager assistance of members of his front-bench team, Starmer has deterred substantial numbers of women, including members of the party, from voting Labour. It’s an agonising situation for many of us on the Left and centre-Left, who desperately want an end to 12 years of Conservative government, but have watched aghast as the Labour Party opened its arms to trans activists. Now Boris Johnson has been replaced as prime minister by Liz Truss, a hard-Right ideologue who actively opposes the redistribution of wealth, Labour should be facing an open goal. Instead, we have a leader who last week warned republicans to show respect to people mourning the death of the Queen, while displaying no respect at all to women in his own party.
He's made his choice. Perhaps he genuinely believes that trans women are women - or perhaps he thinks it would be a mistake to change now. Or, more likely, he knows the fury from the left of the party that would greet any repudiation of gender ideology. He's only just managing to keep the Corbynites at bay: to face up to the trans activists might be a step further than he's prepared to go.
In the Seventies, Labour governments passed ground-breaking legislation on equal pay and sex discrimination. Now the party has been captured by an extreme ideology which, to anyone with half a brain, is an excuse for an outpouring of misogyny. We don’t know the exact number of trans people in this country but they appear to be vastly outnumbered by self-styled trans activists, who turn up at women’s events wearing home-made masks and balaclavas. They threaten us with sexual violence and their aim is to intimidate women into silence, driving home the message that we are no longer entitled to single-sex spaces. But instead of getting support from leading Labour politicians, all we get is trans slogans and hyperbolic claims about the “oppression” of trans people.
You need a heart of stone not to laugh!
Posted by: Oswald Thake | September 27, 2022 at 01:14 PM