Spectator podcast: Labour's Gender War

[SionnachRuadh]

Madeline Grant and Michael Gove do a deep dive on where the government is currently at on genderwoo, including Bridget Phillipson's delay of the EHRC guidance and Wes Streeting on the puberty blockers trial.

Maddie has been clued up on this subject for years, but it's good to get a long discussion in front of the Speccie audience, and Gove has obviously been paying attention too.

I felt both journalists gave this issue serious and sensitive consideration - very interesting discussion. So many of the discussions nowadays are so much better informed than even a few years ago, it seems some journalists have been on a journey.

Did this touch at all on why Genderwoo also had such a strong hold in the Tories while they were in power? And are all of the Tory adherents now gone, or are they just whipped to stay quiet now because the leadership wants to make gender ideology a “Labour thing?”

I’d love to hear Micheal Gove on that.

Labour’s gender war? That’s a bit rich. Most of the harm from Stonewall to government institutions predates 2024, and Maria Miller (Con) who chaired the Equalities Committee a huge part of the problem…

Am GC as they come but these two are maddening. They are soooo biased plus the hypocrisy of sitting there sneering at Labour who are trying to deal with the shit show that Gove was part of creating is frankly nauseating.

I think most people including the Tories started off in the 'Be kind' camp, and No Debate definitely helped it along . It's taken a long time for politicians to realise the damage gender ideology is causing. And the BBC and Guardian reporting has been woeful.

I think genderism made a surface level of sense to a lot of people across party lines because they associated homosexuality with gender nonconformity. So “be kind/no debate” was viewed through the same lens as gay rights - who does it hurt if a man wears some eyeliner? And for a generation that called young boys “girls blouses” when they were perceived to be unmanly, being a little less harsh about policing gender conformity WOULD have been kind.

The problems with the outrageous, sex-erasing policy implementation were flagged by left wing feminists though - especially lesbians, who were close to the conversations and had the first inkling that the price of questioning any of it was harassment, ostracism, unemployment.

One of the great things about TERF Island is that our pushback is grassroots, woman-lead, and non-partisan. Which is why seeing senior politicians deliberately trying to make this a party issue drives me mad with rage. They are in no position to point fingers and take credit.

The key point in the Right vs Left issue is that the tories had a public consultation before amending the GRA, read the findings, and cancelled the amendments.
Labour saw the findings, ignored them, and put amending the GRA in their policies.
Whatever their faults, the Right are sensitive to public opinion, while the Left are as deaf as a post.

Hello, Conservative Central Office. How nice of you to join us.

Oh behave. Wes Streeting has been entirely sensible on this issue (well, he was until this puberty blocker trial anyway).

Hello, Conservative Central Office. How nice of you to join us.
How very grown up of you. Shouldn't you be in school by now?

Wes Streeting has been entirely sensible on this issue (well, he was until this puberty blocker trial anyway)
Is that the WS who was gathering up the names of the gc members of the LP so they could be expelled?

When I first started teaching, we had no academies. If the school needed pastoral/legal guidance they phoned up the local authority and got an expert.
Academies have been left to their own devices so you now have (male) headteachers ‘designing’ unsuitable mixed sex toilet blocks. It is similar with other venues and (lack of) local council building control sign offs.

Michael Gove needs to remember that privatisation led to deviation from standards and legislation, that is quite complicated, lengthy but there for valid health and safety reasons.

Gove is honest in saying that it's been a problem in all parties, and he's generous in his tribute to those in other parties who were right e.g. his friend Joanna Cherry (we don't have to be bound by tribalism all the time!)

Personally I am shocked, shocked, to discover that a highly ambitious politician like Wes Streeting would say different things to different people, or that Bridget Phillipson might seek to water down EHRC guidance because it's unpopular with Labour MPs. Both of them, I assume, will be candidates to succeed Starmer.

They might still do the right thing if there's countervailing pressure. But you can't trust that your chosen party will do the right thing because it's your chosen party. If you're a Labour supporter, the dingbats on the Labour benches are your problem.

There are two strands to Conservatism:

1. a belief in the free market, so live and let live and if people want to call themselves trans, why stop them

2. traditional values

Some Conservatives are more pro one than the other

I only realised this recently and I am so disappointed in him. I really hoped we had someone who had morals and standards looking after the NHS. DH and I have worked for decades in the NHS, hours and hours of unpaid overtime, huge amounts of extra work over and above the pay grade. What a let down.

I think that both Labour and the Conservatives pulled back at the point that they realised they would be responsible for e.g. rapists in women's prisons. But neither have been particularly proactive.

The Conservatives don't want to get involved in human rights legislation and Labour just want somebody else to sort it all out.

If I had to choose between Gove and Streeting I'd give up.

I thought this was an excellent discussion. Compared to the centrist dads of some other podcasts, Michael Gove was impressive.

re: Conservatives made all the mess, we should remember that it was Sajid Javid who commissioned the Cass Report, and it was the Conservatives who pushed back against the Scottish government’s GRA. It may have been too little, too late, but at that stage Labour was completely captured.

Off topic, but Gove and Grant are much funnier than Stewart and Campbell or the news agents — though admittedly that’s a low bar.

I think that both Labour and the Conservatives pulled back at the point that they realised they would be responsible for e.g. rapists in women's prisons. But neither have been particularly proactive.

Again, the conservatives, after consultation, halted any reform of the GRA. Labour heavily criticised this decision and promised to carry out reforms to allow for self-ID.

Labour have also banned Conversion Therapy.

I'm not saying that the tories are perfect in this respect, but they're a lot better than Labour.

Really good point.

Did it have a strong hold?

Almost everyone, including the vast majority of people on FWR who now fall roughly into the GC stance, were broadly supportive.

It was across political parties.

Ultimately they stepped back from it, at a time when a fair number of people were hesitant to speak out in their workplaces and schools. While the left lambasted them for it and used it as proof of bigotry on the right.

I'm not sure I would describe that as having "such a hold." Arguably they were sniffing the political winds, as it was initially populist, then fell into disrepute.

I'd say it was more that it seemed populist, because there was so little resistance for a long time. For years the critical voices were Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer and that was about it.

I'd say most people gave it very little thought, and most of us here - especially if we knew one or two old school transsexuals - were at least vaguely supportive. But I think the number of people actively pushing the agenda was quite small.

In terms of the Tories it has to be seen in the context of Cameron's leadership pushing through gay marriage and deliberately having a confrontation with party traditionalists to show liberal metropolitan voters they had changed. Someone in Theresa May's circle - I'm not certain who but it's not a big circle - convinced Theresa that self-ID would be low hanging fruit.

It faced little resistance at first but it didn't really bed down - I'd speculate because the Tories are less ideological than the left-leaning parties. Maria Miller became a fanatical TRA and did huge damage, but it was never clear if she understood what she was fanatical about. And sceptics began to pop up - Gove was certainly a quiet sceptic early on, maybe because he's Scottish and maybe because he has friends on the left, and of course he was Kemi's great mentor.

But once the tides changed in Tory world and it became seen that TRA politics was very unpopular, most of the support melted away quite quickly and it really did become confined to a small group of fanatics like Crispin Blunt. Kemi isn't a leader without critics, but her stance on trans is completely uncontroversial in the party.

It's the left leaning parties who have developed really stubborn anti-reality tendencies. It might be useful to ask why.

"Almost everyone, including the vast majority of people on FWR"

Really? I thought the topic really started to be discussed in around 2015 when Tara Hudson was trying to be moved to a woman's prison and Stonewall started to push self ID? I can't remember many people supporting self ID or the idea of men in women's prisons.

I think there were a few true believers, but most Tories are suspicious of any kind of human rights or equality legislation, so, some of the arguments made by feminists left them cold. Looking at the FWR Scotland case, the Tory solution would just be to abolish the quotas.

Again, the conservatives, after consultation, halted any reform of the GRA.

So did nothing.

Labour heavily criticised this decision and promised to carry out reforms to allow for self-ID.

From the safety of opposition.

Labour have also banned Conversion Therapy.

Have they done this yet?

I do agree that Labour still has a sizeable number of MPs who support the removal of sex based rights (including at least one minister), and as far as I am aware, the Conservatives don't.