Labour's attempt to hide its cowardice over trans rights won't work

Telegraph

22-05-2025

After years of evasion, doublethink and delay, the Labour Party crowned its tortuous journey towards acknowledging the rights of biological women by, er, cancelling its own Women's Conference.
If the event had gone ahead with a ban on trans women attending it would have enraged trans-rights activists and amounted to a victory for the advocates of women's rights. So, unable to stomach the thought of either appeasing the gender-critical winners of the landmark Supreme Court ruling or facing down the irate losers from the trans lobby – amid fear of an embarrassing disruption or worse – it appears that the solution the party arrived at was: 'Let's hope the whole sorry business just goes away.' It looks both cowardly and cynical.
At a meeting this week, Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) voted to limit women's officer roles and all-women shortlists to biological women in compliance with the ruling and wash their hands of the one-day Women's Conference scheduled for September. One leaked briefing document handed to NEC members about the ruling included the advice: 'To do otherwise would expose the party to significant risk of direct and indirect discrimination claims succeeding.' In other words, comply or we could get sued. The Women's Conference, it seems, is just more trouble than it's worth – and the message this sends out is pretty clear.
A statement by the gender-critical rights advocacy organisation Labour Women's Declaration said: 'We are of course pleased that the party is finally aware that it must comply with the Equality Act. However, cancelling our conference for fear of protests against a women's event is not the answer… We are shocked that hundreds of women in the Labour Party might be prevented from meeting at conference because the NEC would prefer to disadvantage all women rather than to exclude the very small number of trans-identified men who may wish to attend the women's conference. The party should not act in fear of threats and demonstrations.'
The Telegraph 's columnist Suzanne Moore tweeted: 'So Labour can't have a Women's Conference for fear of what? Male violence. Why not say it?' It looks as though Labour knows enforcing a single-sex space at a women's conference would trigger vociferous and potentially unmanageable protests by trans-rights groups who oppose the Supreme Court ruling and, in some cases, have set out to defy it. The 'optics', as they say in Westminster, would not be good. Labour is trapped between the threat of direct action from trans activists on one side and ruinous legal action by female members on the other.
This is a mess entirely of its own making and one that suggests something rather ominous beyond its historic fudges on the issue of women's and trans rights. It says that working out a coherent policy and sticking to it was beyond the Labour leadership. And by desperately seeking to avoid confrontation with either side, especially among its militant backbenchers, it has simply alienated both even further.
In the past, many senior members of the Labour cabinet have endorsed gender self-ID – an illustration of the extent to which gender identity became holy writ within the party. Sir Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and others have all, at one time or another, publicly accepted the proposition that trans women are women, which is now untenable under the terms of the Equality Act. The ways in which a succession of then shadow ministers squirmed when asked 'What is a woman?' (some even scoffed at the temerity of the question) shows how ingrained their confusion had become. With a majority on the Left happy to accept the strictures of gender ideology for the sake of an easy life, it placed them on a collision course with the law and reality. Yet just this week, during a Commons debate, four Labour MPs still called for transgender people to be allowed to self-identify as having a different gender to their biological sex.
Some Labour MPs just don't seem to have even a basic grasp of the issues, preferring instead to parrot well-worn lines about protecting the trans community. Of course trans people should be protected, but by retreating to this mantra without understanding that this can't – indeed now must – not be done at the expense of the rights of women seems to be beyond their intellectual powers. Either that or they are pretending not to understand.