Labour’s Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson and the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, tore chunks out of each other in Parliament this week, as they jockeyed to prove which party cares more for women’s rights in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. Both Phillipson and Badenoch attempted rewrites of recent political history.
“This government will continue as before, working to protect single-sex spaces based on biological sex … ” claimed Phillipson, apparently forgetting Labour’s previous policy of support for self-identifying gender, and the fact that the Prime Minister only realised what a woman is yesterday.
Badenoch wasn’t having any of it, damning Phillipson’s statement “a shameless work of fiction” and replaying Keir Starmer’s awkward attempts to answer the woman question, from 2021’s “it is not right to say that only women have a cervix”, to 2022’s “it is the law that trans women are women”, and 2023’s “99 per cent of women don’t have a penis”.
“I know what a woman is and I always have” declared Badenoch. “The people of this country know what a woman is — we didn’t need the supreme court to tell us that. But this government did.”
It’s understandable that Conservatives would want to stick it to Starmer’s Labour after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act. Labour has supplied the Tories a target-rich environment, from David “men can have a cervix” Lammy, to Dawn “a child is born without a sex” Butler, and Stella “some women have penises” Creasy. Towering over them all in his moral failure is the supreme political coward himself, the Prime Minister — a man who loves talking about all the terribly difficult decisions he has to take as PM, how he’s “country before party”, how he’s so much better than the rest of us — but is too scared to say boo to the trans activist radicals in his own party, or to say anything at all to former Labour MP Rosie Duffield who was hounded out of Labour for views which now, apparently, the government has always shared.
Yes, the Labour Party deserves a thoroughly good kicking — and Badenoch, whose record on these issues is stellar, has the moral right to deliver it.
But the decade of gender madness which might now, hopefully, be drawing to a close, was not begun by Labour.
It was the Conservatives, under Theresa May, who invited extreme, misogynistic trans activists into the policy making process.
It was the Conservatives who wanted to make gender recognition certificates available on demand.
It was the Conservatives who sought to replace “sex” with the absurd concept of “gender identity” in law.
It was the Conservatives who took one look at Stonewall’s ludicrous, totalitarian package of trans activist demands and said “we’ll take the lot!”.
Ultimately, it was the Conservatives who, in cahoots with Stonewall, initiated a decade of cruelty and stupidity, which saw women hounded from their jobs, harassed and attacked by trans activists, demonised and abused. A decade which frightened many from speaking openly about their own experiences, their own bodies, lest they too lose their jobs and reputations.
Theresa May — who in 2002 had slightly disturbed the party conference with her “nasty party” comment — had become PM and declared her aim the rooting out of “burning injustices”. She had taken an interest in trans issues while Home Secretary, co-authoring the “Advancing Trans Equality” report with her coalition government partner, Lynne Featherstone, in 2011. She also became pals with Stonewall at this time, giving speeches at their events, and her rise to the premiership coincided almost exactly with Ruth Hunt’s promotion to CEO at Stonewall.
Competing with Nokes to be the most dedicated Tory promoter of gender dogma is Alicia Kearns
The stage was set for Stonewall’s new trans-first agenda to be ushered wholesale into government.
The roll-call of fools and cowards responsible for doing this begins with Maria Miller, the Conservative chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee from 2015. Miller spearheaded the drive to embed gender identity ideology in public policy, and it was her committee which embraced long-standing radical trans activist Stephen Whittle (among others) whose lifelong project has been to see the triumph of gender identity ideology over biological sex.
Miller’s report adopted Whittle’s agenda wholesale, advocating gender self-ID and the inclusion of trans women in women’s sport, the watering down of same-sex protections, and rewriting of the Equality Act to introduce gender identity as a protected characteristic. The report also accused the NHS of “failing to ensure zero tolerance of transphobic behaviour”. As women pushed back, Miller claimed to be taken aback by the “extraordinary hostility” to her proposals “from a minority of women purporting to be feminists”.
Mirroring Miller’s views a few years later was Penny Mordaunt, Minister for Women and Equalities 2018-2019. It was Mordaunt who had responsibility for the public consultation over the proposed introduction of gender self-ID and she took an uncompromisingly trans-first position, declaring to Parliament on 3 July 2018; “Trans women are women and trans men are men. That is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.” In 2022, as she competed for the Tory leadership, Mordaunt attempted to rewrite a little history herself; “I’ve never supported self-ID” she claimed.
In response to Miller and Mordaunt’s mad ideas, women organised and new grassroots groups were founded; Fair Play For Women, and Women’s Place UK emerged in 2017, with Let Women Speak and For Women Scotland arriving a year later. In 2019, two long-standing lesbian activists founded the LGB Alliance.
As the women-led resistance took shape and gained in power, the (now ex-) Tory MP Crispin Blunt took matters into his own hands and began working secretly to get the government to accept self-ID. The All Party Parliamentary Rights Group on Global LGBT+ rights, which Blunt chaired, produced a report in 2020 in collaboration with trans groups, which he attempted to get adopted by the government without it being published publicly. Public disclosure “would have undermined our political strategy” he admitted — “it was my judgement that if this paper could be communicated to the government privately, and as representing a wide collective agreement, they would be more likely to adopt it as theirs”. The Standards Commissioner found that Blunt’s APPG had not been appropriately transparent.
Lately, taking up the job of championing gender identity dogma within the Conservative Party has been Caroline Nokes, chair of the Women and Equalities Committee since 2019. Nokes has consistently been a mouthpiece for Stonewall policy, and one of her more absurd positions was her denial that male violence even exists; “It’s a wholly depressing state of affairs that we regard people who are born as biologically male as dangerous” she said in 2023. Nokes was an enthusiastic tormentor of EHRC chair Baroness Falkner, throughout the unwarranted accusations of harassment Falkner faced a couple of years ago.
Competing with Nokes to be the most dedicated promoter of gender identity dogma in the Party is Alicia Kearns, whose absurd moments include her haughty slapping down of gay MP Neale Hanvey for daring to speak the letters LGB without obligatory appendation of the “T” — “I will not stand for it!” she thundered, hilariously.
Nokes and Kearns have piped down over the last few days — whereas Richard Holden MP was taking to the airwaves on Sky as soon as the Supreme’s issued their ruling claiming that “the Conservatives have been quite clear on this as we were in our manifesto. I’m glad the court has come down on the side of what we’ve been saying …” He accused the Scottish government of “trying to ram gender self ID down the throats of the British people”. Can this be the same Richard Holden MP who co-authored with Alicia Kearns a 2020 article for Conservative Home endorsing gender self-ID? Why, yes, it is.
Theresa May’s disgrace was capped by her decision to ennoble Ruth Hunt, the former Stonewall CEO responsible for mainlining gender identity dogma into British society. Hunt fled Stonewall as the failure of her grand project became clear, and, thanks to May, she’s ensconced for life in the comfort of the Lords.
Labour presents such an easy target on this issue that it’s not surprising the Conservatives are keen to take aim and fire. That’s party politics. But it’s a strange feature of gender identity ideology that it corrupts politicians on both Left and Right. No party has clean hands.
Laura Trott, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, has been loyally airbrushing the Tory record since the Supreme Court ruling; “biological sex matters in law — the Conservatives have always defended this principle.” Trott has been an MP since 2019, so she knows this isn’t true. She’s super-keen to take the fight to Labour; “Labour spent years hounding women for speaking the truth and defending their own rights. Now Labour are attempting to rewrite history and pretend they supported women all along. The British people aren’t fools.”
No, we’re not, Laura. Our brains are big enough to remember further back than last week.
We know which party started this.
