Keir Starmer: Trans rights can't override women's rights - 0 views
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after seeing the political turmoil that engulfed Nicola Sturgeon’s final days as Scottish first minister, Starmer is keen to clarify both his personal and his party’s position on the subject.
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Speaking about Sturgeon’s gender recognition bill, which proposed self-identification for those wishing to change their legal gender, Starmer says: “The lesson from Scotland is that if you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey. And that’s why I think that collectively there ought to be a reset in Scotland.”
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It sounds like a marked change of tone from the Labour leader, whose party prevaricated over the issue only weeks ago by first whipping its MSPs to vote for the gender bill in Holyrood, then asking MPs in Westminster to abstain when the government exercised its veto over the legislation.
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Labour’s troubles don’t end there. For months Starmer and his shadow cabinet have tied themselves in knots attempting to answer what appears to be a rather basic question: can a woman have a penis?
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Starmer’s failure to articulate a simple position has put him on a collision course with feminist groups and his own MP Rosie Duffield, who has claimed that the party has a “women problem”
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he says: “For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological . . . and of course they haven’t got a penis.”
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According to the 2021 census, 262,000 people in Britain — 0.5 per cent of the population — stated that their gender identity was different to their sex registered at birth. Of those, 48,000 — 0.1 per cent — identified as a trans woman.
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Starmer says: “Look, of course I’d want to know. I say that as a parent. I would want to know and I think the vast majority of parents would want to know. That’s why we have to have national guidance on it and they should try to make it cross-party, because it’s not helpful to parents or schools to have this as just a toxic divide when what’s needed is practical, common sense advice.
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He adds: “There are some people who identify as a different gender to the one they are born with. It’s a very small number and that is why the Gender Recognition Act was passed [in 2004].
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“To recognise that they need legal support and a framework and most people don’t disagree with that, and that’s the framework within which we ought to look at these issues. But simply turning it into a toxic divide advances the cause of no one, the cause of women or those that don’t identify with the gender that they were born into.
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And it’s also a pattern of behaviour of the last ten years which is now turning everything into a toxic culture, when it possibly can, which is the last resort of politicians who have nothing substantive to say on the issue.”
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On the subject of children, Starmer, who has a son and daughter with his wife, Victoria, is also clear that there is a need for greater transparency from teachers
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only 39 out of 140 English secondary schools were “reliably informing” parents when pupils identified as trans or questioned their gender.
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In an attempt to win back the support of gender critical campaigners and MPs, Starmer is eager to stress that there will be “no rolling back” on women’s hard-won rights, saying: “I think there is a fear that somehow there could be the rolling back of some of the things that have been won. There are still many battles that need to go ahead for women and I don’t think we should roll anything back. I think we should go on to win the next battles for women. And that is a very important sort of starting point for this debate.”
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he is clear that in order for Labour to overturn the Tories’ majority — which was a historic 80 seats at the 2019 election — it will require him to stick to his three-part plan for power: to change the party, expose the government’s failings, and have the answers to the challenges facing the country.
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“You’ve got to have a race strategy. And my strategy was that you’ve got to be in the leading pack as you go round the track three and three-quarter times. But you shouldn’t hit the front too early
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each time you go round the lap, there are people on the side going: go faster, pump harder . . . And what we’ve had to do over the last three years is to keep the discipline, which is that we have got a strategy, we are operating to it and there is such a determination to get us over the finishing line, which would be such an incredible achievement if we can go from the disastrous defeat of the 2019 election into power.”