March 22, 2023 - 8:00am

If Labour wants to form a new government, then the party needs a new policy on trans rights. If anyone is still in doubt about that, they need only look north of the border. Three months after Nicola Sturgeon forced her doomed Gender Recognition Reform Bill through Holyrood she is now packing her bags, and the once invincible Scottish National Party is in a tailspin.

Keir Starmer, however, has a problem. He has already sold himself to the activist lobby that thinks the law can be changed to allow anybody to change their legal sex and that nobody will take advantage. That is why senior figures are now warning him to change his trans policy to be more in line with the public’s views on the matter.

When the UK Government finally saw sense and dropped the idea of gender self-ID, the Labour Party reaffirmed its commitment to “introduce self-declaration for trans people”. That was 2020. The following year, Starmer repeated that promise personally in a recorded message for Pride Month. It all seemed so simple when dissenters could be dismissed as transphobic bigots. But the spectacle of double rapist Isla Bryson being sent to a women’s prison put an end to the pretence in Scotland.

Over the water, self-ID was introduced back in 2016. Indeed, Ireland has often been held up as an exemplar. However, even there the illusion is fading. Barbie Kardashian – a violent male convict – is currently incarcerated in Limerick Women’s Prison following threats to torture, rape and murder. 

Now, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has seen which way the wind is blowing. Speaking to journalists yesterday, Varadkar admitted that he “only heard of this case for the first time in the Sunday papers” even though it is years old. But, crucially, he did not think that biological males should be put into women’s prisons if they are found to have broken the law. I would agree with him, but Varadkar’s problem is that Kardashian has self-identified into the female sex, so what happens then?

This is why the Labour Party needs to change tack. In 2016, Irish self-ID law was implemented with little in the way of scrutiny. That’s unlikely to be the case if Labour brings self-ID to Westminster. The inevitable furore may well overshadow everything else the Party is trying to do. 

The Daily Telegraph indicated that individuals within the party worry that “in trying to do good for a very small minority group, you inadvertently offend an awful lot of women.” But this is not about balancing needs: it is about doing the right thing. Good policy should be good policy for all, but self-ID is bad policy all round. Women are right to protest the impact on their sex-based rights. Meanwhile, I worry that it has had a deleterious impact on the trust and confidence that transsexuals used to take for granted.

The activist lobby is unlikely to give way easily, and no doubt there will be howls and shrieks, but this is a crisis for Labour. Is it the party of working people, or a vehicle for ludicrous ideas? Starmer needs to choose. In 1985, his predecessor Neil Kinnock faced down the Militant Tendency; if Starmer wants to be taken seriously by the electorate, he needs to find the courage and resolve to follow Kinnock’s example.


Debbie Hayton is a teacher and a transgender campaigner.

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