Jo Bartosch at Spiked on Ed Davey and the LibDems and the odd penis joke:

Davey’s intellectually flaccid flapping over this question points to the war raging within the Liberal Democrats – between those pushing for a return to reality and the party’s longstanding, vocal trans allies. These allies include self-described pansexual MP Layla Moran, who memorably claimed in parliament that she could see the gendered ‘souls’ of trans-identified people. Then there is Baroness Lynne Featherstone, who told ‘those who believe they can… exclude trans women from women-only spaces’ that their views ‘are not welcome in the Liberal Democrats’. And there is Baroness Liz Barker, who pushed for the removal of the word ‘mother’ from a maternity-leave bill.

People who don’t believe that men can be women are not welcome in the Liberal Democrats. It never ceases to amaze me, this kind of thing. It’s as if nearly everyone suddenly decided that Avatar was a real, true, factual story, like any true factual story you might read in the NY Times, and at the same time that refusal to believe it is comparable to refusing to believe the Holocaust happened. Nobody should be required to believe either of those things, let alone both of them! Stay with me now. THEY. ARE. NOT. TRUE.

Despite being known as the party of softly spoken sandal wearers, the Lib Dem leadership has sent a hard message to members who deviate from the ‘transwomen are women’ line. At the Lib Dem conference earlier this year, Liberal Voice for Women claimed on Twitter that its attempts to debate a motion on ‘women’s representation on internal committees was prevented from being heard’. On the final day of the conference, party publication Lib Dem Voice produced an article headlined ‘It’s time for gender-critical people to leave’, which proclaimed that ‘there is no space for bigotry in this party’.

See? See what I mean? A grown-up political party calling people bigots for failing to believe in a magical gender soul that overrides the physical body. It’s framed as being similar to not believing that other races are fully human, but IT IS NOT LIKE THAT. It’s not like that at all. It’s very very different.