Rishi Sunak’s election campaign launch might have been humiliating, but Sir Keir Starmer’s revealed something far more worrying about the imminent prospect of a Labour government.
The event was held in Kent and featured a number of Labour bigwigs. But there was a notable exclusion: Rosie Duffield—the only elected Labour MP in the county. The reason for this, though Labour won’t admit it, is both simple and sinister.
The party’s leadership does not want to be associated with Duffield’s mainstream view that only women have a cervix and that transgender women are not women (i.e. they are men). In contemporary jargon, this makes her ‘gender critical,’ or even subject to the slur ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist,’ or ‘TERF.’
Duffield has long been targeted by her own party because of her views on the transgender issue, including an official investigation which eventually saw her exonerated. Reports say that Starmer even refused to meet her “for years,” until he finally accepted last month—in the face of a significant critical review of “transgender medicine”—that Duffield was right to say that only a woman has a cervix.
Starmer’s failure to invite this local (and lone) MP to his Kent campaign launch reveals this climbdown—and Labour’s wider alleged post-Cass report shift on trans issues—to have been skin-deep.
Indeed, Duffield is understood to have only found out about the event after people asked on Twitter why she wasn’t there. Ann Sinnott, who is director of the Authentic Equity Alliance, said this is because “she stands up for women and girls, single-sex toilets and female-only rape crisis centres.”
“Starmer,” she added, “is not to be trusted.”
Writing online, Duffield quipped that “Day One [of the election campaign] has gone well then…!” But she remains hopeful.
Strong women can’t be broken that easily lads. And I have an army of them behind me, in front of me, beside me and holding me up.
J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author who has been highly critical of the Scottish National Party’s approach to trans issues, also weighed into the snubbing of Duffield, writing:
It’s hard not to conclude that in spite of recent attempts at back-pedalling, Keir Starmer’s view on what Rosie Duffield and women in general are allowed to say about their own bodies hasn’t changed since 2021.
In that year, Starmer insisted that it’s “not right” to say only women have a cervix. This contrasts with a slight shift in understanding in 2023, when Starmer asserted his view that 99.9% of women “haven’t got a penis” (which would mean an estimated 342,100 British women do have penises—enough to populate five or six UK parliamentary constituencies).
The treatment of Duffield as a pariah is consistent with recent Labour plans to make it easier to change gender, regardless of significant concerns about the impact of such a move.
