Anneliese Dodds is fooling nobody with Labour’s ‘new’ trans pledge

Anneliese Dodds, who has form in pushing radical transgender ideology, is at it again. While others in the Labour Party have backtracked on the issue – Wes Streeting has finally shed his “trans women are women” mantra – Dodds is doubling down.

Her proposal is clear: simplify the “dehumanising” process for obtaining a gender recognition certificate, possibly allowing just a single doctor to sign the documents off.

Labour had previously planned to introduce full self-id, but shied away from the idea after a major campaign by feminists. Now Dodds appears to be reviving this scheme with the thinnest of disguises

– the explicit aim is to make changing gender easier – at the precise point when the electorate is likely to be most closely watching.

It’s a bizarre choice. The Cass review has just destroyed the stranglehold of trans orthodoxy on public debate, Stonewall is facing a corporate reckoning, and Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to introduce self-id in Scotland was followed not just by her departure as first minister but that of her successor, too. Why does Dodds now apparently want to take her party down a similar path?

It may partly be a matter of reflex. After all, the list of Labour U-turns is growing practically daily, and it’s easy to lose track of a policy here and there. If you’ve grown used to trotting out a pledge for a “full, no-loopholes, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy” – potentially criminalising counsellors and psychologists who offer talking therapies to young people presenting with gender dysphoria – followed by a rallying cry for self-id, it might be difficult to let the policy go.

And, of course, there’s the matter of personal history. Dodds has previously floundered when asked on Radio 4 precisely what a woman is, responding that there “are different definitions legally” before warbling on about “the biological definition, legal definition”. She was at it again the following year, accusing the Conservative Party of seeking to stoke “culture wars” by “demonising vulnerable LGBT+ people”, and criticising the “intrusive, outdated and humiliating” process for getting a gender recognition certificate.

As usual, the rest of the rainbow alphabet was curiously absent in the fixation on the T.

The policy that resulted – despite criticism of the SNP’S self-id position – looked suspiciously similar, and has essentially survived to the present day. The ground, however, has shifted beneath it. What might have flown last summer is now confronted with the massed evidence against gender orthodoxy.

The tide has already turned in favour of the sex realists. Reality has a funny way of intruding, even in Labour circles. It is notable that Sir Keir Starmer has conceded that the brave Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield – who has received monstrous abuse for her stance on gender – was right to say that only women have a cervix.

The stark truth remains, however, that Labour still has what Duffield described as a “woman problem”. This is unsurprising: the party has done more to put the rights of women and girls at risk than the Tories.

Thanks to the likes of Dodds, feminists like me have had to fight tooth and nail to cling on to rights we already fought for decades ago, such as female-only spaces and services. If Dodds thinks our rights are hers to give away, she’ll find herself with a battle on her hands.