I wasted a lot of breath trying to convince fellow leftists in the run up to the last election that a vote for Labour under its current leadership was a vote against LGBTQ+ people like me. Of course it would have been nice to believe they were just making a few dodgy statements about banning trans women from hospital wards to get into office and it would all be fine once the Conservatives were out of power. But that was never going to happen.
Lo and behold, Keir Starmer is welcoming the judgement from the UK Supreme Court. “A woman is an adult female,” he said this week. Never mind that back in the mists of time that was 2022 he was proudly saying “trans women are women”. I genuinely hate to say I told you so, but he was always going to be a craven backtracker.
Sure, Labour politicians once draped themselves in our flags and did nice campaign videos about how they were allies, that Section 28 was a thing of the past, that all queer people deserve to live in peace and dignity.
But now it is politically convenient for Starmer and his cronies to jump on the discrimination bandwagon. It was a vote winner to join the Pride marches and make rainbow-hued platitudes just a few short years ago. Reform is in the rearview mirror and the far right is tailgating global politics, so the LGBTQ+ community can win him votes by getting summarily thrown under the bus.
Labour politicians once draped themselves in our flags and did nice campaign videos about how they were allies
His statement was a wilful misinterpretation of a legal ruling — something that a noted human rights lawyer should be decent at. The UK Supreme Court actually said that women discriminated against on the basis of sex get certain protections under the equalities act, while trans women are granted different protections. But somehow this means that his equalities minister is on the radio telling trans women to use the men’s loo.
To be clear, it doesn’t matter what Starmer actually believes, in his heart of hearts, because he obviously stands for nothing. But he does hope we will fall for anything. Including paying lip service to the latest nasty talking point he thinks will poll well. It’s not even enough to parrot his lines and make trans women more afraid to be in public. JK Rowling, who backed For Women Scotland’s legal case to the tune of £70,000, is currently on X calling Starmer a “coward” to his online face.
Can anyone truly believe that a tiny minority of trans women — when just 0.55 per cent of the UK population is any flavour of trans — are simultaneously about to take every women’s job on a board while hogging all the toilet cubicles in Britain? That cis men, the people responsible for the vast majority of violent crime, need to resort to subterfuge to hurt women? Never mind that to assume biological sex is easy to define in humans, let alone in the weird wilds of the natural world, belies a complete misunderstanding of modern science.
Yes, there are exceedingly rare criminal cases involving trans women hurting other women before or after their transition. But there are so many more cases of men hurting women, or indeed women hurting other women. If by this logic we are all damned by the very worst of us, what to make of the case of Nicola Murray, a vocal campaigner against trans-inclusive refuges who had the support of “gender critical” group Fair Play for Women? Murray has just been found guilty of sexually assaulting four children. Are we to assume all campaigners for single-sex spaces are suspicious, now?
It’s laughably easy to poke holes in transphobic culture war logic, which is just good old-fashioned homophobia trying to divide a minority into more friable components. We’re in your bathrooms/schools/culture to hurt you/steal from you/recruit you. Fill in the minority of your choice and delete as appropriate according to your prejudice.
You can easily exhaust yourself trying to explain your right to exist to hateful people. Because it is very hard to logic people out of hate. And hate is a parasite that feeds on fear, and people are — understandably — afraid.
We have the sixth largest economy in the world and yet our citizens feel so starved of resources we allow ourselves to be set against each other by politicians. It is a national shame that all but a tiny elite are just a few missed paychecks away from poverty and homelessness. That it’s hard to get a GP appointment and the bills are racking up.
But it’s not the fault of minorities that everyone’s lives are feeling hard right now. Believing that is to give into the same venal reflex that has let fascism sneak in to struggling nations throughout history.
Human rights are not a zero sum game, but Labour is trying to play a three-card monte with them. They’ve already gone after migrants and disabled people, pitting a them against the us of the ideal “hardworking family”. The LGBTQ+ community was simply the next easy target. They’ll be on to another soon enough.
You can either care when they finally come for you, or act now, refuse to comply in advance, stand in solidarity with people who might look a bit different to you. I think someone even wrote a poem about that once.
A vote for Labour is just another vote for discrimination and intolerance. If you didn’t realise that a year ago, there’s still time. I promise I won’t ever say I told you so again.
India Block is a columnist for The London Standard
