Is Keir Starmer now backing away from gender self-ID, having seen Nicola Sturgeon's political career dying on that particular hill?
Sir Keir Starmer signalled a climbdown on Labour’s transgender stance on Thursday as he said lessons have to be learned from Scotland....
Sir Keir had previously vowed to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow trans people to self-identify, but appeared to back away from the pledge during a press conference in Stoke-on-Trent.
Sir Keir told reporters: “I think that if we reflect on what’s happened in Scotland, the lesson I take from that is that if you’re going to make reforms, you have to carry the public with you.
“And I think that’s a very important message, and I think that’s why it’s clear that in Scotland there should be a reset of the situation.”
Hmm. And should there be a reset elsewhere? Well, he has at least realised that it's unpopular. Is this the new Labour line? - it would have been the right thing to do, but maybe we'll shelve it for the moment as people are still not on board. Give then time.
Meanwhile Labour in Wales are pushing hard for gender self-ID, having conspicuously learned nothing from Scotland, while Scottish Labour were falling over themselves to support Sturgeon's doomed plan.
Joan Smith remains unconvinced:
It’s not as if we’ve been pushing at an open door. Women in the Labour Party have been trying to talk to Sir Keir Starmer for years about the need to protect women’s rights — and he hasn’t listened. Now, suddenly, he claims to have a “very, very clear position” on how to balance the rights of women and transgender people.
Really? I suppose he has at least tempered his enthusiasm for making it easier for people to change their legal gender, which he committed to a couple of years ago. But anyone who is aware of Labour’s ‘woman problem’ might be forgiven for thinking that what Starmer has come up with is at best unclear and at worst a fudge. What, for instance, does he propose to do about one of the core demands of women’s rights campaigners, which is to protect single-sex spaces in refuges, prisons and hospital wards?
“We have made real and significant progress when it comes to women’s rights”, Starmer now says, “and we must not roll back or retreat from any of that, and one of them is safe spaces.” See what he did there? Not ‘single-sex spaces’, which means restricted to biological women. ‘Safe spaces’ is a wishy-washy phrase, often used by protesters who claim that the mere presence of women talking about our rights makes them feel ‘unsafe’.
The unequivocal phrase ‘single-sex spaces’ is evidently a step too far for Starmer, which means he still hasn’t committed to the basic principle of allowing women to access services that don’t admit men. It isn’t clear that his new position does anything to protect organisations running refuges for victims of domestic violence, which have faced repeated demands to admit male-bodied people who ‘identify’ as women....
It would be easier to give Starmer credit for what appears to be a shift in policy, however small, if he were willing to talk to women in his own party. Since he became leader, however, he has shown himself endlessly willing to repeat the slogans of trans activists, but a great deal less accommodating when it comes to allowing feminists a hearing.
As Rosie Duffield can testify.
If women are going to support the party at the next general election, we need Starmer to offer unequivocal support for single-sex spaces, even if he has to do it through gritted teeth.
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