Private cross-party meetings for politicians worried about the erosion of sex-based rights encouraged the Labour leader to start speaking up at last
... many of us have missed the way this debate has also broken down party boundaries. It has brought together a group of MPs who are in no way like-minded. One of them is Baroness Jenkin. Jenkin and Conservative colleagues found themselves offering a safe space to Labour MPs who were at odds with their party’s policy on gender self-identification.
The most high-profile of these is Rosie Duffield, who has previously said she feels as though she is in an “abusive relationship” with her party – hardly something she would say lightly, given that she also escaped domestic abuse a few years ago. Even though the gender-critical Tories enjoy spending time with Duffield, she is manifestly not one of them: she disagrees vehemently with the two-child benefit limit, for instance, and doesn’t have much truck with the other views of the more strident Tory campaigners such as Miriam Cates. Yet she and other Labour women have ended up confiding in those Conservatives because they have found the atmosphere in their party so hostile for the past few years.
Many of these women regularly join cross-party meetings held in parliament for politicians worried about the erosion of sex-based rights. They were set up two years ago by the three gender-critical campaign groups in the main parties: Labour Women’s Declaration (LWD), Conservatives for Women and Liberal Voice for Women. Initially, they met monthly and over Zoom – more recently their meetings, private and under the Chatham House rule, have gone weekly. They include peers and MPs who gather to hear from experts in sex and gender, transgender people, people who have detransitioned and clinicians.
Everyone involved agrees that the gender-critical movement in politics was slow to get going, and didn’t notice the many changes to policy that ministers, public agencies and other organisations were agreeing to without much public fuss – until it almost seemed too late. In the past couple of years, activists have gone into a frenzy of organising to try to catch up and change party and government policy. As Jenkin says, it was easier in the Conservatives, if only because senior figures, including Sunak, saw the topic as a way of undermining Starmer. But the real prize was Labour party policy, because the debate is still largely happening on the left, not in the Tory party.
This organising paid off at the end of July when the Labour national policy forum met to thrash out the basic direction of the manifesto. One of the decisions it reached, supported by the leader’s office, was that the party would no longer have self-identification as its official policy in relation to Gender Reform Act reform. Many LWD activists are angry that there has been no acknowledgement of or apology to all the women in the party who have been abused for merely holding what is now Labour policy, and other than a brief comment from Wes Streeting, no apology to Duffield or other female MPs for the way they have been treated. However, all agree that they should now be in the position where to say that biological sex matters isn’t treated as heresy within the party. But it is still not a fully comfortable place to be.
This is from a longer article printed in the Observer, as unlikely the Guardian would have published it, but it still has some of the Guardian's usual weasal words. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/13/keir-starmer-gender-politics-labour
I wonder if it is a positive to have this more publicly known. Or will die hard partyist demand loyalty and insist women dont do anything so independent as meeting with other woman with a common cause that cuts through party lines?
(If there is an existing thread on this let me know and I'll get MNHQ to delete. I did search but nothing came up.)