Main Edition
US
FR
The face of a man who doesn't know what a woman is. Credit: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
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.
Appeals to the party to change its mind have been rejected, even after more than a dozen Labour MPs and peers signed a letter to The Observer calling for a rethink. The signatories included Dame Diana Johnson MP, current Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and Lord Triesman, a former Foreign Office minister and former general secretary of the party. There was a time when such luminaries would have been listened to, but not anymore. Now the party likes women who sign emails with their pronouns and declare themselves “trans allies”, such as the individual who screamed abuse at a man holding his baby at a women’s rally in Brighton last weekend. Carly-May Kavanagh (“she/her”) turned out be an aide to a Labour MP, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who shot to public attention a couple of years ago when he accused J.K. Rowling of using her experience of sexual assault to attack trans people.
Depressingly, this view probably isn’t unusual in the Labour Party, given its current attitudes to women. In the run-up to the May council elections, a Labour canvasser knocked on my door in West London to ask for my vote. I greeted him warmly and said I had a couple of questions. “What is a woman?”, I asked politely, but he declined to answer. “It’s not a local issue,” he claimed, ignoring the fact that half the local population is female. When I asked if he supported the principle of single-sex spaces, he bridled. “As a member of the local LGBTQi community, I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” he told me. He is now a Labour councillor.
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 doesn’t answer letters or emails describing the abuse we’ve faced. (I’ve sent him two about misogyny in the party.) And he can’t even bring himself to condemn attacks on meetings of Labour women with smoke bombs. (He can’t say he doesn’t know about any of this because I told him to his face at a Labour Women’s Network dinner in April.) In the face of intemperate and frankly deranged attacks by gender extremists on women who have supported Labour for decades, Starmer has observed a Trappist silence.
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.
As far as we know, not a single trans woman has been murdered in this country since 2018. This is good news, but it’s drowned out by claims that trans women are more likely to be killed than natal women. It isn’t true: two or three women are killed every week by current or former partners, while matricide is a much more common crime than people realise. According to the Femicide Census, 141 women were killed by a male suspect in 2021; in the years between 2009 and 2018, the figure was 1,425 women and girls aged 14 and over. Reported rapes are at a record level in England and Wales, reaching 70,330 in 2021/22, but few rapists ever see the inside of a courtroom. A steep downward trend is visible in domestic violence prosecutions, which fell from almost 125,000 six years ago to 76,965 in 2019/20. All of this amounts to an epidemic of violence against women, not trans people, so why do Labour politicians spend so much time talking about the latter?
It’s becoming clear that the conflict is not between feminists and a small number of trans people who, in any case, have the same rights as the rest of us. It’s between growing numbers of women and what is in effect a profoundly misogynist men’s rights movement, which has seized the opportunity provided by weak leadership in the Labour Party. (To be fair, the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens are just as culpable.) When it refused to allow feminist organisations to have stalls at this year’s conference, Labour picked a side — and it’s the wrong one. But feminists in the Labour Party are not going away.
This evening, the Labour Women’s Declaration will host a sold-out meeting outside the main conference area in Liverpool. It will be chaired by Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour MP for Gower and Shadow Minister for Northern Ireland, and speakers include Dame Diana Johnson. I’m speaking about why making misogyny a hate crime, as the Labour MP Stella Creasy advocates, would harm women, because it will lead to a torrent of vexatious complaints from trans activists.
Hopefully, some of those Labour Party luminaries in attendance will be listening. With honourable exceptions, such as Antoniazzi and Rosie Duffield MP, Starmer’s party has got this issue badly wrong. It is freezing out feminists when it should be supporting women whose reasonable views are met with terrifying threats. It’s time for the Labour leader to ask himself: does he want to go down in history as the man who allowed misogyny to run riot in his party?
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women will be published in November 2024.
polblonde 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“Trans women’s access to women’s spaces isn’t anything new … yet suddenly this has become the burning feminist crisis of our time”. I’ll tell you the real reason why. In the past trans women’s access to our spaces was by consent. It wasn’t forced or imposed. Most trans women were sexually attracted to males yet loved and respected women. Instinctively we perceived no threat.
Now, a very different type of person can overnight declare themselves a ‘woman’, make a mockery of femininity and force themselves into female spaces as a ‘right’, as an act of power and, probably, misogyny. Many remain sexually attracted to women. Although female intuition is a bit of a stereotype, like most stereotypes it’s based on something real. And we intuit something backward and rotten here.
You are so right. Perfectly described.
Worth considering the traditional useful role agent provocateurs anyone?
Just in case this comment doesn’t make any sense: it was originally in reply to another reader’s comment from where the quote was taken. The comment has disappeared.
Good comment, except that I think it would probably be a good idea to refer to such people as transvestites rather than transwomen.
There have always been transvestites but now they are receiving honour from the wokists. They have gone one step further through surgery but it is obvious they are men.
And yet you do have women’s spaces. Remember that men aren’t allowed them, otherwise we get taken to court and/or attacked as ‘misogynists’ by your type.
I am lacking in sympathy. Feminists are upset because having campaigned for decades to get special unequal rights and privileges, now men have found a way to hack the system and get those same privileges, making things equal again. So of course suddenly the sky is falling and it’s all about hate blah blah blah.
Who cares? Not me. I’ve watched as gender-based injustice runs rampant for my entire life, always with men as the losers. Watching feminists finally die by their own sword is funny. Welcome to the club, ladies. It’s open to all.
Some men like the women in their spaces. Thank goodness the women don’t want to be in the men’s spaces.
I think this will be reversed under Liz Truss but probably re-started under Starmer. What a nightmare. He’ll probably lose the women’s vote once they really know about him. If they vote for him it will be a transgender nightmare. He already doesn’t know what a woman is or he is not risking the transgender vote.
.
Once you go down the road of agressive identity politicking, it’s almost impossible to turn round. The Labour party are reaping what they have sown.
Starmer’s “small s stonewallism” is symptomatic of the broader, decaying, political class which he represents. A weak leader, with little political initiative of his own, he’s advised and supported by ideologues not living in the real world.
That was why, when presented last April with facts (by a former Labour voter; there are lots like him) about the gross harms caused by the lockdown policies that he had repeatedly goaded the government into imposing, he could only respond with the non-sequiturs that he “disagreed” with the facts, that his wife is an NHS worker, and that “the vast majority recognise that the lockdown is necessary”. Let us never, ever forget what he did to people over those two years.
This is a man who, if he thinks at all, he thinks in slogans, painted in bright primary colours. A man with little curiosity about the world around him, a man trapped in a groupthinking bubble of activists and policy advisors, a man who accepts what he’s told at face value or rejects it in its entirety. A man who lacks the moral courage and strength to try and understand and engage with what those with different perspectives actually have to say, and to grapple with complex, emotionally and intellectually demanding problems to which there is no single right answer. A man who is ripe for manipulation by clever little devils in Beijing and Geneva. A man whose mind is made up. A man utterly unfit to fill office to which he aspires.
In his defence, many of his ostensible political opponents, and potential leadership candidates on his own side of the increasingly irrelevant party political divide, are almost just as bad. But it is in Starmer that the cold inauthenticity, the lack of human connection, the ideological capture, and the hubris is the most pronounced and so clearly dominant.
Our politics is crying out for someone to come in and fill the enormous void created by the flight to the extremes by reality-denying ideologues of the market and woke varieties. As we face what could be for many a very painful period of economic hardship, the big question is will this void be filled by an angry, nationalistic, reactionary populist, or by a radical, dissident, tenacious, liberal? After this useless set of plastic leaders get washed away, will we get an Enoch Powell, or a Barbara Castle?
Both. Both is good.
The progressive ideology of the 19th century was National Liberalism. In the 20th it was treated as reactionary by the forces of illiberal nationalism and international liberalism alike. But the current crises point to it being the only political force that is shaped to fit your void. And, in the persons of Zelenskyy and Meloni (both of them advocates of fundamentally liberal economic models and both of them declared opponents of wokery), is already re-emerging.
I’m in the U.S. Do you mind if I cut and paste your comment – changing “Starmer” to “Biden” or “Harris”, of course – into a host of similar comment sections here in the states? I promise to give you attribution.
The problem is that Labour is largely fuelled by envy and spite. Envy of all who are better off, whether as a result of hard work or ingenuity or of the luck of birth and spite against all who fail to tow the currently fashionable line whatever that may be.
The author may have been happy to support envy and spite when the feminist dogma was the prevailing Labour dogma but once a madder dogma has been adopted she complains. Of course the behaviour of Labour towards organisations supporting a traditional conservative approach towards women’s spaces and a sensible approach to competitive sport is disgraceful but Labour’s approach has always been driven by envy and spite it’s just that the author did not recognise it when it didn’t affect her.
Well done! It all makes sense now. The modern left opens its mouth and spews envy and hate. It was only a matter of time before they came around to eat their own.
My philosophy has long been beware the ism-ists. They scream burn it all down, destroy our enemies and scream some more when their isms are replaced by shiny new ones. They are not well people.
You’re right.
Petard hoisting – it was not the Right which brought you this woke….
And the writer says this trans madness is ‘‘and what is in effect a profoundly misogynist men’s rights movement,”;
No… they hate both sexes equally – I think they hate families most of all, this Political self Eunuchising group do not even like each other. A very odd outlook – you cannot have the sexual organs you wish, so render yours sterile. It is the ultimate Nihilism.
Those who call themselves “transgender women” claim to be women. Whether other people agree with them or not about biology, transgender women themselves clearly want desperately to be women and will resort to shocking methods in order to achieve their goal. For them and all other ideologues, including feminist ideologues (as distinct from egalitarian feminists), the end justifies the means.
Some people suspect that their underlying motivation is “misogyny,” but no one can make that speculative claim stick. It’s true that the result of transgender ideology is a big problem for women–and, not incidentally, for society as a whole–but merely claiming that the transwomen are misogynistic does nothing to explain the phenomenon. It does a great deal, however, to sustain the longstanding polarization between women and men.
As for the “cis” supporters of transgender ideology, even their motivation isn’t necessarily reducible to misogyny. I suspect that many or most of them have simply adopted the latest form of identity politics in order to indulge opportunistically in virtue signaling (let alone to gain votes for their party). And the chief strategy of identity (or woke) politics is not to engage in rational debate (a supposedly “patriarchal” form of oppression) but to intimidate and silence opponents.
“Some people suspect that their underlying motivation is “misogyny,”
That’s what I don’t get. All those feminists who kept claiming there are no biological differences between men and women, equal pay irrespective of performance, inserting women into male only spaces…Who made it oh so easy for nutters who think rapists can be in female prisons or men compete in women swimming…
Were they also misogynists? Or is it only awful when women get to face the consequences of their own actions?
*for most the underlying motivation is sexual gratification
Feminists think it’s about misogyny because they think absolutely everything is about misogyny. There is no movement so full of self-pitying narcissists as feminism.
It is precisely their insistence on gender neutrality (when it suits them) that has paved the way for the trans movement. I have zero sympathy for them.
I recommend that the writer go and read her Carl Schmitt, who wrote, many moons ago, that politics was all about fighting the enemy.
Gotta have an enemy, and wow, has the Left gone to town on that over the last century and a half.
Today the Left’s Little Darlings of yesteryear have been cast aside — hey, remember the workin’ class? — for the latest hottest victims of the patriarchy, or the racists, or the homophobes, or the transphobes, or whatever victims Lefties have conjured up since yesterday.
Really, feminists today should be Tory toffs. Maybe in another ten years.
Abso-frickin’-lutely! My sentiments exactly.
They express conservative thought in their condemnation of the thugs within the “trans” activist bunch but fall right back to leftist talking points when it comes to conservatives.
Sorry, dear, you’re “right-wing” now in everything BUT name.
Will they ever learn?
Alleged comedian Patton Oswald admitted that the only time he’s truly comfortable is when he has an enemy. It’s apparent that this is the standard operating system of those on the left. Can’t imagine how miserable it must be.
Feminists won’t learn.
Just look at this piece:
“All of this amounts to an epidemic of violence against women”
Whereas maybe 80% of victims of violence are men, and conversely when a woman needs help, whether from police or passerbys, it’s usually a man who steps in.
Or:
“downward trend is visible in domestic violence prosecutions”
Not for female on male domestic violence, which is half of the total. Difficult to dip below near zero level.
Thank you Joan. It is very disturbing. So many in the Labour Party are turning a blind eye it is unbelievable. How can they think women’s right to defend and protect the very real vulnerabilities of their biological sex is of so little importance? I can no longer vote for them.
Starmer is a weak man whose ambition has completely overwhelmed any small vestige of principle he might once have possessed. His behaviour as DPP and enabling of Corbyn should have been adequate warning.
I would like to make it clear that, despite being a “man”, I am not a fan of the modern Labour Party.
Feminists – now the wrong sort of victims. There’s no longer any political power to be extracted by supporting feminists (or several other, older, victim groups).
That’s cold…and all the colder for being spot on.
Soon, there will be far more muslims (and muslim voters) than gays in most western countries.
Want to bet who is the next whining victim group who will soon really have something to complain about?
Already in this country there are more muslims than Welsh or Northern Irish people.
Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has – if you call its tail a leg.
When the crowd answered “Five”, Lincoln told them, “No, it’s four. Just because you call the tail a leg, does not make it a leg”.
Currently across the West we seem to live in a world where many people believe that calling something by a different name somehow changes reality.
It’s time adults – and especially those who aspire to lead Governments – reminded people that that is not so.
Don’t worry. Starmer will soon change his mind. There was a point when he couldn’t see any antisemites in the Party even when they were sitting next to him. The suddenly he could see all of them and was shocked about it. I expect that the same will happen here.
This leader has allowed misogyny to run riot in his party. The last one, antisemitism. Who is voting for these people any more?
It’s just another deeply misogynistic religion. What’s funny is the Left think they are above such atavistic behaviour. Transubstantiation, dogma, catechisms, heresy. The Magisterium in California. A network of High Priestesses & Hand Maidens. Will the British people be daft enough to elect the Right Reverend Keir Starmer?
‘what3words, to describe the place the author, and her ilk, are at, (chicken / roost / myopic).
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face!” sobs woman who voted for Leopards Eating People’s Faces party.
You say Truss actively opposes the redistribution of wealth like it’s a bad thing.
I expect many people will fail to understand that point!
As it seems both parties are intent in ignoring what their voters (women’s rights/curb immigration), you really have to ask yourself who is pulling the strings else it makes no sense at all
I don’t know whether it’s about a men’s rights conspiracy or not. What I do know is that in a democracy tiny minority groups should not have such a huge voice.
Can you really have a ‘conspiracy’ involving 48% of the population? And if the minority sex want their human rights (such as equality under the law, equal education opportunity), why is that misogynistic, other than that feminists see men having rights as a threat?
One word for “Sir” Starmer – Rotherham.
It seems to be the nature of the Labour Party that something has to run riot in it. Having largely removed the non-democratic socialism of Corbyn and friends, a new messianic cause was required. Labour just can’t cope with two separate principles meeting head-on. They don’t do compromises.
It’s the same here in the U.S.. Title IX which was hard won is being dismantled by the Biden administration. Anyone even remotely questioning trans ideology is deemed a “right wing, fascist, bigoted zealot.” The “vote blue no matter who” crowd is screaming about voting the republicans out because they hate women. After all they are anti choice, but no one is talking about the fact that Title IX is destroyed. Nor are they talking about the fact that Joe Biden’s historical record is anti-choice or the reality that the democrats have had decades to codify abortion rights into law and haven’t done so. This is not an oversight on their part. The most insidious gaslighting is being played out with virtue signaling and identity politics which not only obscures economic inequality in favor of inclusion but is setting women back decades.
Because of what Biden has done to Title IX, and what Gov Newsom has done in advancing gender ideology, this NorCal voter will be carefully, selectively voting Republican in November.
I don’t think Liz Truss is “hard-right”. Love her or hate her or be indifferent, but there are plenty of people to the right of where she stands.
“… Liz Truss, a hard-Right ideologue ….”`
Oh, come on! If you aspire to be taken seriously keep your bigoted views to yourself!
Much of this article I totally agree with. The bit early on about Liz Truss shows the author to be bigot abd unfortunately destroys the credibility of what is otherwise a well written piece, Great. Shame
The American journalist Lisa Selin Davis speaks of the urgent need for the left to educate itself on the trans issue in this important discussion, which suggests light is beginning to dawn at least in some minds:https://fairforall.cincopa.com/watch/A4HAcLOLOO68!AcDDgx1GyuUE
Based on the above, I rather doubt she’d vote for Truss if there was an election tomorrow and the only choices were Truss & Starmer.
Starmer and his labour party do not care about real issues (they probably don’t even understand them). They exist simply on fermenting jealousy. Hence their rise in the polls caused by them and MSM concentrating on Truss/Kwarteng reducing the 45% tax rate and bankers’ bonus cap.
And the sheeple fall for it again.
And he is going to win the country? Doesn’t say much for the country. More woke than I thought.
Didn’t feminists tell us that womanhood was entirely socially constructed, that one is not made but becomes a woman? Sounds very trans-ideology to me. They can’t spend decades telling us men and women are interchangeable then go back on it once people take them up on thst thesis.
If you allow a man to be a woman just cause HE feels like it, where will it end. Can I pick my race? Or can people pick their age, what would then also put kids in danger.
Anyone can believe what they want, but that does not make it facts and definitely doesn’t make it right.
Muslims BELIEVE eating pork is wrong, but we still eat pork and sell it.
Being respectful to people is one thing,
But saying a woman is no longer a woman but a Cis woman while a man who lives as a man 24/7 looks like a man 24/7 can be a woman cause he feels like it. It’s twisted and allowing people to appropriate a identity.
Their argument is it’s their truth, but what about our truth. Thier truth is not backed up by facts, science or biology, and they want to oppress the majority for the few it’s Sick and wrong.
Because he wants to win an election. Which means plain, boring, uncontroversial politics. Feminist loons are as unhelpful as trans loons.
Also, the thing that feminists did to others is now happening to them.