Carys Moseley comments on the fallout between the Labour Party leadership over transgender ideology.
The candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party are caught up in a perpetual fight over transgender ideology. In reality, the entire party is on a downward spiral here. This week the debate reached a new low when Dawn Butler, one of the deputy leadership candidates and the current Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, told Good Morning Britain presenter Richard Madeley on ITV that babies are born without a sex. More recently, former Labour prime minister Tony Blair has chipped in too.
Dawn Butler says babies are ‘born with no sex’
It may sound too crazy to be true to say that Dawn Butler said that babies are born with no sex. Here is the evidence caught on video. The reaction on Twitter was a massive backlash, thankfully. It’s important to realise that this falsehood is an extreme instance of transgender ideology manipulating intersex issues. It is assuming wrongly that midwives assign a sex to babies rather than perceiving them to be male or female. It wrongly generalises from the fact that some babies have ambiguous-looking sexual characteristics when they are born and so require tests to see whether they have congenital anomalies known as Disorders of Sexual Development.
Free speech magazine Spiked Online was quick to respond by accusing Labour of being ‘the political wing of the Flat Earth Society’.
Labour Campaign for Trans Rights
What lies behind all this is that the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights was launched on 10 February, with a 12-point pledge. All the female leadership and deputy leadership candidates signed the pledge.
The ninth of the twelve pledges called several groups opposed to a gender identity law in the UK ‘transphobic hate-groups’ and called on party members to fight them. These were listed as A Woman’s Place and the LGB Alliance. There was an angry reaction to this claim, and thousands of Labour members took to social media to challenge the party to expel them for transphobia, using the hashtag #ExpelMe. The latest is that A Woman’s Place has demanded to see the evidence used to prove transphobia.
Jess Phillips bites the dust
Jess Philips started all this when she was a candidate. She angered Mumsnet members when she responded in a live chat with them back in January that ‘trans women are women’.
“I do believe transwomen are women and helped to write the report that suggested changes to the GRA (Gender Recognition Act) because fundamentally, during that enquiry, I couldn’t understand how asking someone to live in a role as one sex or another would actually happen.”
The response she got for this pack of lies was women saying that they would switch votes from Labour to Conservative. A few days later Phillips dropped out of the leadership race. The issue however did not go away.
Keir Starmer, the quiet man
Keir Starmer, former Director of Public Prosecutions and favourite in the Labour leadership race, did not sign the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights pledge, saying that ‘trans rights are human rights’ but saying the issue should not become ‘a political football’. He is clearly mindful of not splitting the Labour support base. Also, using the mantra ‘trans rights are human rights’ pulls the wool over voters’ eyes by making it look as if he is backing out from saying ‘transwomen are women’.
In reality ‘trans rights are human rights’ is a well-known rallying cry for trans activists of all kinds, and simply means that they demand special rights in legislation. The problem is that because Keir Starmer is keeping quiet in this debate this makes him look more sensible than he probably is, with the result that Labour will not recover any time soon from this madness.
Rebecca Long-Bailey attacks truthtellers
Rebecca Long-Bailey was the first leadership candidate to sign the 12-point transgender pledge. She has called loudly for the expulsion of ‘transphobic’ members of the Labour Party in what has been characterised as a Stalinist purge. What this means is that she wants people who insist on telling the truth about who is male or female to be thrown out of Labour. She also had the arrogance to argue that male-to-female transgenders should be allowed into women’s refuges, and that the entire debate on the matter should stop. In so doing she showed total lack of concern for the very civilized notions of single-sex spaces and free speech.
Emily Thornberry’s astounding hypocrisy
The most hypocritical of all the leadership candidates is Emily Thornberry, who said on Twitter that she had signed the pledge, only to reveal simultaneously that she had misgivings about calling some organisations ‘hate groups’. Her hypocrisy is astounding.
Thornberry’s husband, Judge Christopher Nugee, is a High Court judge. Perhaps Emily Thornberry was ‘in’ on some of the misgivings in the legal profession about transgender rights and how they clash with sex-based rights and free speech. In any case she is now out of the Labour leadership race. This leaves Starmer, Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy still in the running.
Lisa Nandy’s uncivilized logic
Lisa Nandy is the candidate with the most chilling take on the issue. She had the affrontery to say, in response to a question, that child rapists should be allowed into women’s prisons if they chose to be housed in them. This is the candidate whom some commentators in the press are calling ‘thoughtful’.
Pink News then unearthed evidence from her time at university leading the Students’ Union where she complained that the LGB society was allowed union funding when it only allowed LGB students to join. Since then she has had to protest that she isn’t ‘anti-gay’, that she fully supports LGBT rights policies. Nandy’s total rejection of single-sex spaces being reserved for biological women and girls is based on the same logic as wanting everyone to be allowed to join the LGB society in a university. It is based on an overriding obsession with being ‘inclusive’. Everybody should be allowed to join every exclusive group to which they do not really belong. The true ideology here is the breakdown of all sexual barriers between men and women. Again, totally uncivilized.
Why are the candidates fighting over this?
This continuous infighting over who can be most pro-transgender is increasingly repulsive to ordinary citizens, many of whom would no longer consider voting Labour as a result. It is telling that the most arrogant candidates such as Long-Bailey come from Momentum, the far-left movement that grew around Jeremy Corbyn and plotted to capture the party, much like Militant Tendency in the 1970s. At this point one would be correct to point out that Labour’s problem is wholesale adoption of Marxist ideas about the need for ‘oppressed groups’ in society to be ‘liberated’ from constraints. I have previously explained how Marxism lies behind the entire jurisprudence of transsexual rights across Europe including the UK. However, there is a crucial link to the Labour Party which needs to be analysed here.
One important Labour party member is Stephen Whittle, the female-to-male transgender legal academic who is the architect of transsexual rights in the United Kingdom. Whittle founded several key transsexual rights campaign groups in the 1980s and 1990s, including Press For Change which was key in getting Tony Blair’s Labour government to push through the Gender Recognition Act. More recently Whittle was also a Special Adviser to the Women and Equality Committee of the House of Commons in its inquiry on transgender rights. This inquiry has raised eyebrows as apart from a few politicians, only transgender activists and allies were invited to give oral evidence at its hearings in 2015-2016.
The sheer hypocrisy of Tony Blair
In an extraordinarily hypocritical intervention, Tony Blair himself has now said that he would refuse to sign the transgender rights pledge were he standing again for the Labour leadership post, as there are ‘all sorts of issues that need to be resolved’. He made this remark in an event at King’s College London marking one hundred and twenty years of the Labour party. He said this:
“You have got to distinguish between the advocacy of certain things that are right – and you can say that whether it’s gay rights or transgender rights or whatever it is – and launching yourself politically into a kind of culture war with the right,”
Blair went as far as saying that Labour would simply lose to the Conservatives if it made transgender rights ‘totemic’, as the Conservatives would likely respond by saying that their big issue was immigration.
Nevertheless, Blair still maintained that having a stance in favour of transgender rights was ‘right’, so just like Keir Starmer, he was just playing with words whilst maintaining an appearance of respecting freedom of expression. His stated purpose was to make Labour electable once again after its dismal failure in the general election.
Stop deceiving voters
These brazen word-games by Keir Starmer and Tony Blair show a rotten combination of cunning and calculation combined with an elitist arrogance towards party members, not to mention the electorate in general, who having already rejected Labour in droves are unlikely to tolerate any more transgender ideology in the next general election. It is vitally important that conscientious Labour members see through them and not just refuse to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey or Lisa Nandy. Labour’s problem is that none of the candidates are prepared to defend the fact that only adult biological females are women, and only adult biological males are men.
Is it remotely possible that Blair is somewhat embarrassed by the obvious fact that transgender bullying policies are forcing us all to lie on pain of losing our jobs, our livelihoods and our reputations? Does he not realise – as a professing Christian – how monstrously wicked all this really is?
