Westminster’s tortuous battle with the gender question

[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nn4 hours agoShareSaveBen WrightPolitical correspondentBrian WheelerPolitical reporterShareSaveGetty ImagesWhat is a woman?In recent years it is a question that has caused political punch-ups, party splits and despatch box spats. A complex, emotionally-charged and fiercely contested argument around gender, trans rights and women’s sex-based rights has often left politicians at Westminster floundering to answer a seemingly straightforward question. Today’s Supreme Court ruling may, just may, calm a political row that has produced all sorts of verbal contortions, particularly from Sir Keir Starmer.Appearing on the BBC’s Question Time election debate in June last year, the Labour leader said he agreed with former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s comment that “biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis”. But he was criticised by the Harry Potter author and former Labour donor JK Rowling, who accused the party under Sir Keir’s leadership of a “dismissive and often offensive” approach to women’s concerns.The question of self-identification for transgender people has long been thorny for the Labour Party. Its 2019 manifesto committed Labour to introducing self-identification. In September 2021, the then-leader of the opposition slapped down one of his own MPs, Rosie Duffield, for saying that only women have a cervix. Sir Keir told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “That shouldn’t be said. It’s not right.”Duffield has since quit the Labour Party and now sits as an independent.Speaking to LBC in March 2022, Sir Keir was repeatedly pressed on the issue, saying the “vast majority” of women “of course don’t have a penis” – adding that those who are born with a gender they don’t identify with should be treated with respect. With the issue increasingly divisive in his own party, the Labour leader said to the Sunday Times a year later: “For 99.9% of women, it is completely biological… and, of course, they haven’t got a penis.” By the summer of 2023, Labour’s position had shifted and the party ruled out introducing a self-ID system to allow people to change their legal sex without a medical diagnosis. Sir Keir told BBC Radio 5 Live: “Firstly, a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.”Often sounding completely exasperated by the question, the Labour leader said in one interview that “almost nobody is talking about trans issues”, querying why it had become a focus of fierce debate. But it had, whether he liked it or not.The Conservative Party repeatedly tried to ridicule Sir Keir’s position and carve out a clear political dividing line. At the Tory conference in 2023, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, said: “A man is a man, a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.” But his jibes against the Labour leader were not without controversy. During Prime Minister’s Questions in February 2024, Sunak jokingly ridiculed Sir Keir for U-turning on how he defined a woman. But the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey – who was transgender – was in Parliament that day and Sunak faced calls to apologise.By the time of last year’s general election, Sunak said voters faced a “crystal-clear choice” about the protection of single-sex spaces, promising to rewrite the Equality Act to make clear that sex as a protected characteristic means biological sex. Today’s Supreme Court ruling has been welcomed by the Conservatives, with leader Kemi Badenoch calling it a “victory for all of the women who faced personal abuse or lost their jobs for stating the obvious”.As Sunak’s women and equalities minister, Badenoch led the UK government’s efforts to block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.She has previously criticised what she called “extreme gender ideology” and “trans ideology” and opposed gender-neutral toilets. And in …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]