Who are among the most oppressed people in this country? The answer appears to be men who claim to be women, according to a leading Labour politician. Lisa Nandy, the Shadow International Development Secretary, has said foolish and offensive things about the conflict between women and trans rights activists in the past. Yesterday, however, she hit a new low when she offered her views at a Westminster lunch. 

Asked about remarks by the author J.K. Rowling, who has described the MP as “one of the biggest reasons many women on the Left no longer trust Labour”, Nandy doubled down. She claimed she speaks out “because we’re talking about one of the most discriminated-against groups of human beings in our country”.

Nandy said she was currently rereading Harry Potter with an eight-year-old, but hit back at Rowling and other feminists who don’t believe that human beings can change sex. “When I look at the way we reduce that debate to things like bodily parts, I think when we look back in history, we’re going to be utterly ashamed of ourselves,” she went on.

Nandy’s disdain for arguments based on biological sex is famous. In 2020, she supported a policy of housing transwomen in female prisons, even if they had been convicted of sex offences. For many women, especially those who have had to share prison bathrooms with biological male offenders, this falls into the category of luxury beliefs. So does the claim that transgender people are more discriminated against than anyone else in the country.

No one has ever been interviewed under caution for claiming that “transwomen are women”, but a woman who tweeted the opposite was summoned to a police interview in Newcastle last week. The disproportionate influence of trans organisations on this country’s institutions, including the police, is jaw-dropping. Transgender people have the same rights and protections as the rest of us, yet NHS trusts, arts organisations and Government ministries have fallen over themselves in an attempt to show they’re “trans-inclusive”. 

The results are obvious and spectacularly undemocratic. Employees find themselves asked to state their pronouns, signalling obedience to an ideology most of us regard as coercive nonsense.

Nandy is one of an influential group of Labour women who keep promoting beliefs that could hardly be more divorced from reality. The party’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner is another, as is its Chair, Anneliese Dodds, whose robotic support for a ban on “conversion therapy” has been condemned by parents, lesbians and gay men.

These women appear to inhabit a different world from the rest of us, having convinced themselves that one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country is the most marginalised. It’s an extraordinary inversion of reality, where transwomen are taking women’s places on boards, winning medals in women’s sports and receiving the kind of access to politicians most pressure groups can only dream about. 

Even worse, they’re trying to impose their skewed vision of the world on the rest of us. Believing in the oppression of transgender people has become akin to holy writ in the Labour Party. When Nandy tells us women can trust Labour, despair at the state of British politics sinks even deeper into my bones.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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