X marks the spot for denial of womanhood
WHAT is a woman? Until about three years ago the answer was pretty obvious: anyone with two X chromosomes. Anyone with a cervix, uterus and usually, though not always, the ability to give birth.Anyone who mothers a child, usually though not always has a menstrual cycle, and who, at different stages of life, goes through puberty and the menopause.
But it seems that Sir Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, assorted Harry Potter stars, the NHS and others too numerous to mention haven’t quite grasped that one. As a result, Labour is haemorrhaging support among women. Good.
We have now reached a stage where Sir Keir Starmer does not reply when asked if a woman can possess a penis (here’s the answer Keir: no.) Angela Rayner has said it’s not acceptable to ask trans people if they have a male appendage. She also backs the NHS asking men if they are pregnant.
Mothers have become “birthing people”. Breastfeeding is chest feeding. The list goes on.
The swimmer Lia Thomas, who now competes as a woman, stands 6ft 1in tall and apparently still has male genitalia, thereby making a complete nonsense of women’s sport. Elsewhere Emily Bridges was initially given permission – until common sense prevailed – to compete in a woman’s bicycle race this weekend, despite being born a man.
It has recently emerged that one woman was raped in a hospital ward and then told she couldn’t have been attacked because there were no men on the ward, although there was a trans woman, clearly preoperative. After an outcry the police were forced to back down. Meanwhile men who identify as women are being allowed into female changing rooms, operating as rape councillors to women too traumatised to speak to a man, allowed into female prisons where more attacks have taken place and viciously bullying the likes of the courageous JK Rowling who has pointed out that all of this is putting women at massive risk.
Is it just a coincidence that as women have come to have more personal power than at any time in history, a huge backlash has begun to undermine women’s rights?
A fusty old misogynist who believes women should stay at home and tend to the family and leave men to run the country might not, at first glance, appear to have much in common with some elements of the trans rights brigade who are eroding almost every breakthrough women have made in the last 150 years, but what they are doing amounts to exactly the same thing.
They are undermining women, destroying their (our) rights and denying the most basic common sense.
Unfortunately, women DO need to be protected from some men. And among those men are those who will opportunistically grab any chance to attack a woman, including saying he identifies as one himself.
NO ONE wants transexuals to suffer: of course they should be recognised and have their own rights respected. The most beautiful woman I ever met was technically a man.
However Angela Rayner has said this is not about “men coming into women-only spaces”: as a matter of fact it is.
This is a fad: in a few years’ time it will have passed and people will wonder what collective madness seized a society that has denied truths that have been acknowledged for about 200,000 years.
But people are going to be damaged in the process: the women who will be attacked, and those driven out of sports they loved, and the children encouraged into transitioning. It is no longer acknowledged that an awful lot of people feel a little confused in their teenage years; being a tomboy does not mean you want to become is a man.
As for Labour, the chances of my voting for them under any circumstances have always been non-existent, but Keir, Angela and the rest have just ensured a lot of wavering female voters won’t touch them with a bargepole. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer gang.