Feminists in the UK are ditching their lifelong loyalty to the Labour Party and turning to the Conservatives over the issue of transgenderism, a Labour MP has said.
Rosie Duffield, who chairs the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, told The Telegraph that her Labour colleagues are “making complete idiots of ourselves” over women’s issues and warned that the party risks seeing an exodus of feminists if it fails to clarify its stance.
She said she “constantly” receives messages from female Labour activists who have found themselves “shouted down” at party meetings for saying that sex and gender are not the same or that women-only spaces such as changing rooms should be protected.
“There is a loud minority shouting aggressively and there is no debate allowed,” she said.
Duffield said many feminists who had been lifelong anti-Conservatives are now considering voting for the Tories at the local elections in May, because they no longer feel represented by Labour and “don’t know where to go.”
“Don’t forget these aren’t just centrist women, they are Labour trade union women who have been councillors and activists for a really long time and supportive of the left of the party. They are the ones doubting where to put the cross.”
The Labour Party, the UK’s main opposition party, has found itself in difficulty over transgender issues.
Last month, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer refused to answer the question of whether a woman can have a penis, saying instead, “I don’t think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run.”
On International Women’s Day, Yvette Cooper and Anneliese Dodds, two prominent female Labour MPs, both struggled to come up with a definition for the word “woman.”
Cooper, the shadow home secretary, refused three times to define what a woman is and told Times Radio she was “not going to get into rabbit holes on this.”
When asked the same question on the BBC, Dodds, Labour’s shadow minister for women and equalities, said there were “different definitions legally” and added, “I think it does depend what the context is, surely.”
Duffield herself been subjected to abuse and threats for her opposition to “male-bodied biological men” being allowed to self-identify as female in order to access women-only spaces such as prisons and domestic violence refuges.
She opted not to attend the Labour Party conference in September after receiving threats from transgender activists.
She was also criticised by party activists and even party leader Starmer for saying “only women have a cervix.”
Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has been vocal on her views on transgender people and biological sex, said in March that Starmer could “no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights.”
PA Media contributed to this report.
