JKR has a stemwinder of a piece on Labour’s contempt for women.

She went to a launch party for The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht yesterday evening, and got home just in time to join her husband watching Keir Starmer on TV.

“Three years ago,” the woman in the studio audience said to Keir Starmer, “you criticised your MP Rosie Duffield for saying ‘only women have a cervix’. You recently backtracked on this. What do you believe now, and how do we know that you will stick to your views?” Ah, Cervixgate. I remember it well. It was September 2021 and I was sitting at my kitchen table reading over the chapter I’d finished the day before. The TV was on in the background, my husband was making toast, and I thought I must have misheard what the Labour leader had just said, so I reached for the remote. I rewound the programme and replayed his answer, then rewound and replayed it again.

She didn’t want to believe what she’d heard.

But I hadn’t heard Starmer wrongly. When asked whether he agreed with Rosie Duffield that “only women have a cervix”, he’d responded, “well, it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”

If you’d catapulted me forwards in time from 1997, the year Labour last succeeded in ending a long stretch of Tory rule, and told me their male leader would appear live on television, dictating what women were allowed to say about their own reproductive systems, I’d have had no frame of reference by which to understand what would have seemed an utterance of outright lunacy.

Unfortunately, by 2021, Starmer’s answer had to be seen in the context of a Labour Party that not merely saw the rights of women as disposable, but struggled to say what a woman was at all.

And why? Because so much of the left is fathoms deep in outright lunacy.

Some of this is almost funny, but loses its humour when real-world consequences of gender ideology arise. When asked whether violent sex offenders who transition should be rehoused in women’s prisons, Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for international development, said: “I think trans women are women, I think trans men are men, so I think they should be in the prison of their choosing.”

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the candidate for Salford, said female victims of male violence shouldn’t use their trauma “as an argument to discriminate against trans people” and vowed to change laws to stop women’s refuges excluding men who identify as women.

Women shouldn’t “use their trauma” to defend their rights against an onslaught from men, but men should definitely use their imaginary oppression by women who know a man when they see one to defend not their rights but their grotesque new privileges.

“On the biology,” Starmer began, “I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day, in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.”

Pause for universal disbelief. I know we already knew about this, but the asininity of it doesn’t wear off. Oh I see, Tony Blair said the other day that men have penises and women have vaginas. Did he really?!?! How very exciting and groundbreaking and inspirational. Thank you so much Mister Starmer for quoting him saying that because otherwise we would never have thought of such a thing.

And off we meandered into the familiar trans activist talking points where so many Labour frontbenchers appear to feel most comfortable: “… my view in life is to give respect and dignity to everyone, whatever their position. And I was worried at the time, you referenced that particular debate [when Rosie Duffield stated biological facts], by the way in which the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line …”

Thank you again Mister Starmer for yet again telling us that Rosie Duffield is a mean bitch unlike you and the rest of your friends who all know that men are women if they put on lipstick.

JKR talks about her friendship with Rosie.

She and I share more than the occasional meal and a fairly sweary WhatsApp thread. Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she’s had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings.

Is this what Starmer meant, when he talked about toxic, divided debate? A female MP in his own party being intimidated and harassed? Or was he referencing the activists in black masks who turn up at women’s demonstrations with the declared intention of punching “Terfs”, an intention that has more than once translated into action? Was he perhaps thinking of the trans activists who sang “f*** you” over a microphone as women from all over the world queued outside FiLia, the feminist conference, to discuss issues like female genital mutilation? It didn’t seem so.

The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Blair.

Well there’s a reason for that. It’s because men are nice and women are bitches.