Yesterday, following Kemi Badenoch’s announcement of the Tory pledge to clarify the meaning of sex in law, we were greeted – once again! – with the sight of prominent left and liberal men indulging their penchant for calling women concerned about their legal rights a bunch of nasty meanie witches.
Labour grandee Ben Bradshaw characterised Badenoch’s proposals as a “nasty little transphobic crusade,” while Ian Dunt described Badenoch as “dismal…spiteful” and “toxic” and her proposals as “ghastly.” He has now written a fullfat Substack on her “Carnival of Poison and Hate,” in which he describes her motivations for the policy as a “tiny infinite abyss” of “proud, unashamed, toxicity.”
Obviously, I’m going to be one of the first people to say that, politically, Badenoch is not my cup of tea. Indeed, a government that has spent the last months randomly picking its policies out of a tombola marked ‘How to Appeal to Populists’ is very far from my cup of tea. But Badenoch has consistently done an extremely well-briefed and diligent job of addressing the issue of the conflict between the trans rights movement and women’s sex-based rights, and whatever ‘progressive’ men who don’t GAF about women think, the question of the clarification of sex in law is not just a culture war nothingburger whipped up by a dying government in its last desperate days.
There’s a lot we can say about why, after nearly ten years, leftish and liberal men can’t seem to get their heads around the idea of why women’s protected characteristic and definition in law might actually matter to women. It was said by Jeni Harvey in 2017, it was said by me this morning, and it has been said over and over again by women up and down this country all the way through this fight. Women are not just the walk-on parts and support humans in the drama of men’s lives. You don’t get to just decide that ‘womanhood’ (whatever the hell that means) is a country you can give away to male people to reward them at the end of their heroic quests. Women are whole human people with our own needs and interests, and in order to protect our own needs and interests we need to have our own definition in law. The fact that we are still having to explain why we have a legitimate political interest in our own legal definition, that you don’t just get to give it away to other ‘more important’ people because they want it, and that we have every right to defend our own political interests without being called mean witches, is, I will always maintain, one of the greatest demonstrations of sexism I have ever witnessed in my life.
It’s not wrong to think that the Tories are going into this election waving a culture-war hand. But that is not the same as thinking the meaning of sex in law is nothing but a meaningless culture war issue. It seems entirely appropriate to be cynical about why the Tories didn’t get it together to clarify the Equality Act while in office and have now dangled this promise under women’s noses going into an election they will almost certainly lose. But this precisely leads us to ask what the hell the Labour front bench and their advisers think they are doing???? After the exchange between Badenoch and the EHRC early last year, Labour welcomed plans to review clarifying the EA2010, and Starmer affirmed commitment to protecting women’s single sex spaces in April this year. Which then makes it rather baffling/infuriating/spectacularly enraging, that yesterday, instead of taking the opportunity to underline these commitments – while also making political hay out of the fact that the Tories now look like cynical opportunists – they decided to troop out and inform us this was a load of fuss about nothing.
John Healy, the shadow defence secretary, told us that whether female people exist as a distinct class in law with access to their own spaces was just a “distraction” from real issues that really matter. He suggested there is no need to clarify the Equality Act because there isn’t really any confusion, despite the fact that a veritable binfire of legal confusion has been raging for years, and legal experts in the area are quite unconfused about the fact that the law isn’t clear. Indeed, as Lisa Mackenzie has pointed out, why would the Supreme Court decide to hear a case, if there is no legal matter to consider. Meanwhile, shadow Scottish secretaryIan Murray managed to be only somewhat less flat-footed, murmuring about Labour’s commitment to “respecting women’s rights and women’s single-sex spaces,” whilst, when it comes to clarifying the Equality Act, merely suggesting that no legislation is “perfect.” (Thanks. Reassuring)
This is a load of wanton fudging. This battle has been going on for over a decade now. It has been going on because the trans rights movement has deliberately tried to obfuscate and redefine the meaning of sex in law, and to arrogate rights to women’s single sex spaces women have never been consulted about, and many are not prepared to hand over. Women across the country have put their lives on hold and risked their jobs to clean up an almighty mess (familiar eh) that was made because our political class was asleep at the wheel. Almost everyone, of all political stripes, who has thought long and hard about this issue has come to the conclusion that the best way to sort this mess out is to clarify that when the EA2010 says woman are a ‘female of any age,’ that definition is biological. It’s not even like the Labour Party has the excuse of not knowing which way the political wind is blowing now. They’ve done the polling. They know where the public is on this issue and where the members of their party are as well. They know that the British public is basically ‘soft GC.’ They are ‘live and let live’ about how people present themselves, but not okay with women’s single-sex spaces and sports being ridden roughshod over. And yet, when given a chance to score obvious stonking political points off the Tories, and reassure women that they have our backs, they backslide to the knee-jerk lefty men response of ‘this is all a distraction from actual real issues that matter to actual real people,’ or ‘this woman has no business talking about this and is just weaponizing trans rights,’ supported by a chorus of the usual suspects telling us what spiteful cows we are.
None of this is good enough. This is sexism with red flashing lights and bells on. It’s the kind of unthinking ‘oops-did-we-forget-you-were-people-who-might-matter’ sexism that men (and sometimes women) don’t even notice they’re doing and that really pisses a lot of women off. And it is politically idiotic along more axes than I can count. Yes, the Tories want to use this issue as a culture war football, and the very best thing to do with that is to confidently walk out and take the frickin ball off the pitch. The very last thing you should be doing is telling whole-ass human beings who make up half the electorate – many of whom care a great deal about this issue, some of whom have worked insanely hard and paid a very high price to get it on the political agenda – that this is all a distraction and they are getting their silly little knickers in a twist over nothing. The longer Labour ‘ums’ and ‘ahhs’ and hedges and handwaves, the more dismissive and downright sneery they are about women’s legitimate interest in their own definition in law, the more they fuel the culture war, and the more ammunition they provide for the resurgent and increasingly scary populist right. And I, for one, will not forgive them for that.
