JOAN SMITH: I’ll spoil my poll over Labour’s woman-hating ideology

I used to be excited by elections. I’d walk into the polling booth in high spirits, eager to vote Labour. Previous generations of women fought and died to get the vote and I couldn’t let them down, even when the party was unlikely to win.

Since the age of 11, I’ve stayed up all night to hear the election results. My parents talked so often about Labour’s great figures, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, that they felt like distant members of the family. As an adult, I’ve knocked on doors up and down the country, trying to persuade wavering voters to support Labour.

Not any more. Like many women I know, I can’t vote Labour at this election. Under Sir Keir Starmer, the party that used to be a standard-bearer for women’s rights has become riddled with misogyny.

Under Keir Starmer, the party that gave us the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts has turned its back on women, says Joan Smith

During 2020’s deputy leadership campaign, feminists who took issue with Labour’s approach to trans rights were threatened with expulsion by the eventual winner, Angela Rayner

Leading members of the party have stood by and said nothing as women are harassed, smeared and bullied for stating that human beings can’t change sex.

Worse that that, some of Starmer’s closest associates have joined in. In 2020, during the deputy leadership campaign, we feminists who took issue with Labour’s approach to trans rights were even threatened with expulsion by the eventual winner, Angela Rayner. She still hasn’t apologised for calling several organisations, including A Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance, ‘trans exclusionist hate groups’.

Leading frontbenchers have spouted utter nonsense about biology. Three years ago, Starmer himself told Labour MP Rosie Duffield she was wrong to say only women have a cervix. Perhaps he had been listening to the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, who evidently believes men can grow one.

Lammy famously told Nick Ferrari that ‘a cervix, I understand, is something you can have, following various procedures and hormone treatment’.

Starmer has since rowed back on the preposterous notion that men can have a cervix, but only after a series of bruising interviews. Until very recently, neither he nor Lammy appeared to have sufficient knowledge of basic biology to pass a GCSE in the subject, but such ignorance is widespread. So are beliefs that threaten to put the most vulnerable women in society at risk of male violence.

The shadow secretary for international development, Lisa Nandy, said in 2020 that a male offender who ‘identifies’ as a woman should be housed in a women’s prison, even if he has been convicted of rape. Nandy joined Rayner in signing the pledge card that called for ‘transphobic’ women to be thrown out of the party. ‘It’s a very tough pledge but it’s important that we are tough,’ she said.

Labour grandee Harriet Harman even has trouble telling the sexes apart. In an interview in 2021, the former Cabinet minister announced that ‘deciding if somebody is male or female in sport is very difficult’. Really, Harriet? Not for those women and girls who’ve lost out to biological males who are visibly bigger and stronger.

A rumour that Harman is being tipped to head the Equality and Human Rights Commission under a Starmer administration has caused alarm among erstwhile Labour supporters. And it explains why so many of us can’t vote for a party we’ve supported all our lives.

It pains me to say so, but a profoundly woman-hating ideology has Labour in a steely grip.

‘Trans women are women’ has become an article of faith, embedded across the party, and anyone who disagrees is likely to be accused of ‘hate speech’. Labour has undergone such mental contortions that something accepted throughout recorded history is now supposedly controversial. Until about ten years ago, no one believed that sex is ‘on a spectrum’. None of us went through life desperately trying to avoid offending someone by assuming they were a man or a woman. Or, God help us, ‘non-binary’.

In recent years, some Labour MPs have trumpeted their bizarre and unscientific ideas about sex. They raged at anyone, even their own colleagues, who didn’t believe that men can become women.

Last year, three Labour MPs shared a platform with a trans activist, Sarah Jane Baker, who served 30 years in prison under their original name, Alan Baker, for kidnap, torture and attempted murder.

The MPs claimed to be unaware of Baker’s history.

One of my worries about a Labour landslide is that many new Labour MPs will be unashamed trans activists. Look at what’s happened during the election campaign. There are around 30 million women and girls in England and Wales, compared to just under 100,000 people who ‘identify’ as trans men or trans women. Yet Labour candidates bang on about ‘trans rights’, which is an entirely separate issue.

Would-be Labour MPs sound as though a chip has been implanted in their brains, avoiding the word ‘woman’ and replacing it with ‘person with a cervix’ or ‘birth-giver’. Instead of talking about the party’s promise to halve violence against women, they repeat a script that could have been dictated by Stonewall. ‘Trans people are the most vulnerable and oppressed,’ they intone, as though half the country’s shops and bars haven’t been draped in the pink-and-blue trans flag since last month for LGBT Pride.

Last week, under pressure, Starmer finally acknowledged that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina. (A man, Sir Tony Blair, said it, so it must be true.)

P ersonally, I don’t find it at all comforting that it took our likely next prime minister so long to discover reality.

I could have told him he was wrong, but Starmer doesn’t listen to women. Two years ago, at a dinner, I told him to his face about the abuse many female members have endured for saying humans can’t change sex.

Three years ago, Sir Keir Starmer told Labour MP Rosie Duffield she was wrong to say only women have a cervix

I described a meeting of Labour-supporting women in west London in 2020, when a jeering crowd of trans activists blockaded the building – and set off smoke bombs to scare us into thinking it was on fire. I told him women were scared to speak openly at party meetings – and said it looked to me as though he didn’t care. I wrote to him the next day, pleading with him to condemn the misogyny spreading through the party like wildfire and stand up for free speech. I’m still waiting for a reply.

Labour has been stringing women along for months. But the manifesto tells us where its sympathies really lie. The party plans to make it easier to get a document changing legal sex, allowing biological men to conceal the fact they were born male.

It will allow husbands to get this document before their wives have had a chance to seek an annulment. Unbelievably, forcing women into a same-sex marriage they haven’t agreed to is now Labour policy.

It will ban so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – defined as an attempt to try to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. This would place parents and counsellors at risk of prosecution if they vocally disagree with a child who wants to ‘change sex’.

What Labour won’t do is amend the 2010 Equality Act to say that ‘sex’ means biological sex, not someone’s nebulous ‘gender identity’. It’s a simple step, supported by many women’s organisations, but Starmer himself has ruled it out.

I know where Labour stands – for the men, not the many. Under Keir Starmer, the party that gave us the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts has turned its back on women. That’s why I will head to the polling station with a heavy heart today – and spoil my ballot paper.

Joan Smith is an author and columnist