For at least half a decade now, Labour, like many political parties in the West, has struggled with the contentious issue of “self-ID” – the proposed right of people to self-identity as another sex or gender. Some Labour members and voters, and an undetermined number of the party’s MPs, think that self-ID threatens the rights of women to single-sex spaces. The most prominent critic of the idea within the party is Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury since 2017. When I met Duffield recently, she had little sense of what her party’s policy is, or who is in charge of crafting it.
“In effect the position is to try and please nearly everyone, and the problem with that is sometimes trans rights clash with women’s rights. There’s no getting away from that I’m afraid. Keir [Starmer] has said he wants to protect single-sex spaces, but if you’re hurrying through self-ID, which he has also said he wants to make easier, those two things are going to clash.”
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