As the party continues to flounder
So the Telegraph gets to report that Labour doesn’t know what women are.
Stella Creasy was wrong to assert that a woman can have a penis, a Labour minister has said, as the party continues to flounder with the issue of defining womanhood.
What oh what is a woman? We just don’t know…except when we want to know which people to catcall on the street, which people to pay less, which people to forget to promote, which people to rape, which people to boss around.
Anneliese Dodds, the Labour Party chairman, was asked on Sunday if she agreed with Stella Creasy, her fellow Labour MP, that a woman can be someone who was born with a penis.
Ms Dodds, who is also shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “No, I don’t agree with her. Biological females obviously aren’t. Of course, there are also trans women who have made a transition in their gender, but sex is not the same as gender. Obviously, I have a huge amount of respect for my colleague Stella Creasy, she has done a huge amount of campaigning for women – but on that issue around biology, I do have a different opinion.”
The Telegraph points out that this is a shift from what Dodds was saying just a couple of months ago.
This “gender” ploy is pretty absurd, really. It’s like saying adult humans can put on costumes and pretend to be Eleanor Roosevelt or Shakespeare or Rosa Parks or Vladimir Putin and we will all say they’re not literally those people but they are pretend-those people so we’ll be polite and play along with their game. We don’t do that. We don’t play let’s pretend games with adults…with the single large but clearly demarcated exception of acting, in the sense of movie and theater acting. We do the willing suspension of disbelief thing as audiences at plays and movies, but we don’t carry it on beyond that. Why is “gender” so different? Why is the word “trans” so magical?
Exactly. I can watch a movie and accept Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, but that doesn’t mean I believe Katherine Hepburn is Eleanor of Aquitaine. She merely portrays her in the movie.
Being unable (actually unwilling; I have little doubt these people know a woman when they see one) to define a woman is going to make them look like the village idiot. Most people (with the obvious exception of Trump voters) don’t like to vote for the village idiot.
In addition to Labour Party Chair, Dodds is the Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities. One may hope that this statement indicates a shift towards rationality in the Labour Party’s official policy.
The relevant snippet from the her television interview is here: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1530851707617517570. It is quoted in full in the second passage from the Telegraph, above. This is very different from her interview on Women’s Hour in March, when, as Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, she was asked for Labour’s definition of a woman. That was just embarrassing:
So maybe, just maybe the Labour Party is getting a grip and has stopped being quite so terrified of the trans lobby. There is no doubt that it has been losing supporters over this issue, especially women.
I forgot to include a link to the transcript of the Women’s Hour interview, which is on the Woman’s Place site.