Emily Thornberry is tweeting in reply to Frances Barber, who said she would love Thornberry to look her in the eye and say a man can have a cervix.
Fair play to Thornberry, she does respond and says Barber can come to a constituency surgery any time. Thornberry says she has a cousin who is a transman (she uses ‘trans man’) and she presumes he has a cervix but she has never asked. She says her business is to love him and protect him from bullying.
So we can better understand her motivation, and I’m sure she would happily say that to Frances’s face.
But what would she say next? What, in Thornberry’s view, makes her cousin a man? What is a man anyway? How is that question ‘bullying’? What else will she leave to her cousin to decide?
This is on a day when a rational and compassionate letter is published in The Observer by a number of less captured Labour colleagues, who are not prepared to look the electorate in the eye and make things up because of the preferences of a family member.