arty of Margaret Thatcher to embrace a thoroughly misogynistic ideology and call it feminism. By then, of course, any number of institutions had been captured. Police forces, NHS trusts and government departments competed — and paid — for gold stars from Stonewall. Gender-neutral toilets, male sex offenders in women’s prisons, trans women on female hospital wards — all of these things happened under Conservative administrations, including one led by the Tories’ second female PM, Theresa May.
May was as keen to suck up to trans activists as Keir Starmer would prove to be a few years later. In 2017, she appeared at the Pink News awards, promising to “streamline and de-medicalise” the process of getting a gender recognition certificate, something that sounds very much like self-ID.
The Tories got us into this mess, and it’s ironic that it was the Tories’ third and spectacularly unsuccessful female prime minister who put the brakes on. In 2020, when Liz Truss was Women and Equalities Minister, she abandoned plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, putting her party back on the road to sanity on this subject alone if little else.
This sequence of events is easily overlooked, now that Labour has picked up the mantle from the Conservatives. But the Tories were in power for 14 years and it’s only in the last few months that they’ve proposed amending the Equality Act and banning the teaching of gender identity in schools. Starmer would have less room for manoeuvre if he had inherited a legislative landscape where issues such as women-only spaces were already firmly protected by law….
Identity politics is clearly not easily reducible to a Left-versus-Right analysis, given that Angela Rayner and Anneliese Dodds are now spouting the kind of nonsense we used to hear from Tory women. But it’s hard not to feel this morning as though we’re back where we were seven or eight years ago — and that’s as much the Tories’ fault as Labour’s.
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