This is interesting. Maybe the American democrats and the progressive left will take note. This all has been painfully obvious for a while. I do think I've noticed NYT and similar media distancing themselves from the activist crowd in over the past year or so. American politics are dumber and more extreme than they are across the pond -- left or right.
While upholding trans rights, the Labour Party disassociates itself from radical postmodern theories.
By Helen Lewis
www.theatlantic.com
When keir starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for comment on the BBC’s flagship radio news show. Although Starmer did eventually answer questions on the subject, as part of a wider interview two days later, the overall effect was that of a man who had chucked a hand grenade over his shoulder and walked away, whistling.
To anyone not following the turbulent and sometimes arcane debate that has been raging in Britain, Dodds’s statements might sound uncontroversial, but they are not. Since 2015, when the Conservative politician Maria Miller first proposed self-ID in Britain, the idea that such a system might be abused has been called a transphobic myth by LGBTQ campaigners. Demands for single-sex sports teams, locker rooms, and prisons were thus “exclusionary” and analogous to whites-only buses, schools, and water fountains under apartheid and Jim Crow. Labour, the main party of the British left, has now declared that these arguments are unfair and untrue. The internal dissent has been notably muted.
Helen Lewis: What happens when politicians brush off hard questions about gender
That shift has broader implications, not least in America, where combatants on both sides of the gender war closely follow the debates in Britain. (Queer activists in the U.S. dismissively call the country “TERF Island.”) Labour’s new stance shows how the left can simultaneously acknowledge the needs of an embattled transgender minority, accept the importance of biological sex to public policy, and look for political and social compromises. Admittedly, huge questions remain about how the party’s proposals will work in practice and whether its Welsh and Scottish branches will fall in line. But Labour has signaled the beginning of a serious democratic conversation, after years of implicitly agreeing with the LGBTQ activists who insisted that no debate was acceptable.
As a leader of a left-wing party, Starmer has sent an important sign by disassociating himself from the radical postmodern idea that the distinction between males and females is a social construct, and that biology has nothing to do with women’s historical oppression. (“Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies,” the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote recently. “We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.”)
Labour’s new position represents a big ideological shift, but it wasn’t presented as one. That is typical of Starmer’s personality, which is unshowy but ruthless. Unlike many American politicians on either side of the spectrum, he has tried to find a position that will make the debate less inflammatory, and to appeal to the wider country rather than his activist base.
In the three years since the Conservatives dropped their commitment to self-ID, some of their politicians have gleefully seized on the vote-winning potential of gender as a culture-war issue. By contrast, during that time, Starmer and his ministers have been fumbling over their answer to the question What is a woman?, talking about cervices far more than anyone outside a gynecology department would wish to. A desire to stick to the progressive line has meant that Labour politicians have ended up saying baffling things like “A child is born without sex.” Some have attacked interviewers for even bringing up the subject, which just drew more attention to their tortured answers. Stuck arguing about the exact percentage of women who have a penis, Labour couldn’t talk about Britain’s housing crisis, high energy costs, crumbling infrastructure, poor economic growth, and high inflation.
That era is now over, if rank-and-file Labour politicians want it to be. Two days after the Dodds column appeared, Starmer was asked to define woman. He responded simply, “An adult female.” If that answer is permissible in left-wing circles, interviewers have been deprived of an easy gotcha question, and Labour can go back to talking about economics and trying to win over the median voter.
While upholding trans rights, the Labour Party disassociates itself from radical postmodern theories.
By Helen Lewis
The Gender War Is Over in Britain
While upholding trans rights, the Labour Party disassociates itself from radical postmodern theories.
When keir starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for comment on the BBC’s flagship radio news show. Although Starmer did eventually answer questions on the subject, as part of a wider interview two days later, the overall effect was that of a man who had chucked a hand grenade over his shoulder and walked away, whistling.
To anyone not following the turbulent and sometimes arcane debate that has been raging in Britain, Dodds’s statements might sound uncontroversial, but they are not. Since 2015, when the Conservative politician Maria Miller first proposed self-ID in Britain, the idea that such a system might be abused has been called a transphobic myth by LGBTQ campaigners. Demands for single-sex sports teams, locker rooms, and prisons were thus “exclusionary” and analogous to whites-only buses, schools, and water fountains under apartheid and Jim Crow. Labour, the main party of the British left, has now declared that these arguments are unfair and untrue. The internal dissent has been notably muted.
Helen Lewis: What happens when politicians brush off hard questions about gender
That shift has broader implications, not least in America, where combatants on both sides of the gender war closely follow the debates in Britain. (Queer activists in the U.S. dismissively call the country “TERF Island.”) Labour’s new stance shows how the left can simultaneously acknowledge the needs of an embattled transgender minority, accept the importance of biological sex to public policy, and look for political and social compromises. Admittedly, huge questions remain about how the party’s proposals will work in practice and whether its Welsh and Scottish branches will fall in line. But Labour has signaled the beginning of a serious democratic conversation, after years of implicitly agreeing with the LGBTQ activists who insisted that no debate was acceptable.
As a leader of a left-wing party, Starmer has sent an important sign by disassociating himself from the radical postmodern idea that the distinction between males and females is a social construct, and that biology has nothing to do with women’s historical oppression. (“Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies,” the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote recently. “We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.”)
Labour’s new position represents a big ideological shift, but it wasn’t presented as one. That is typical of Starmer’s personality, which is unshowy but ruthless. Unlike many American politicians on either side of the spectrum, he has tried to find a position that will make the debate less inflammatory, and to appeal to the wider country rather than his activist base.
In the three years since the Conservatives dropped their commitment to self-ID, some of their politicians have gleefully seized on the vote-winning potential of gender as a culture-war issue. By contrast, during that time, Starmer and his ministers have been fumbling over their answer to the question What is a woman?, talking about cervices far more than anyone outside a gynecology department would wish to. A desire to stick to the progressive line has meant that Labour politicians have ended up saying baffling things like “A child is born without sex.” Some have attacked interviewers for even bringing up the subject, which just drew more attention to their tortured answers. Stuck arguing about the exact percentage of women who have a penis, Labour couldn’t talk about Britain’s housing crisis, high energy costs, crumbling infrastructure, poor economic growth, and high inflation.
That era is now over, if rank-and-file Labour politicians want it to be. Two days after the Dodds column appeared, Starmer was asked to define woman. He responded simply, “An adult female.” If that answer is permissible in left-wing circles, interviewers have been deprived of an easy gotcha question, and Labour can go back to talking about economics and trying to win over the median voter.
