There are a couple of things that come to mind, watching this:
First – Boris Johnson really couldn’t have gotten luckier if he had been allowed to pick the leader of the opposition himself.
Second – what are the chances, ever, under any circumstances, that RTE would ask a question like this of an Irish politician?
Is it transphobic to say only women have a cervix.
Starmer: It shouldn’t be said. It is not right. #Marr pic.twitter.com/BGRbeK08H8
— Ben (@Jamin2g) September 26, 2021
The problem with the trans debate for the left, especially in the United Kingdom, is that it is almost the dictionary definition of a “wedge issue”. What is a wedge issue? It is an issue which causes you a problem because it is very important to your supporters and activists, but where the majority of swing voters have the complete opposite view. In other words, Starmer is stuck: If he says “Yes, only women have cervixes”, then he will set off a civil war in his own party, where legions of loony activists passionately believe that men have cervixes too, and that women have penises. But by appeasing those activists, he is also telling ordinary voters that he is one of those activists, and that they risk electing a Prime Minister who believes that women and men have interchangeable parts.
And so, it makes it much easier for Boris and Co to sell a simple message about Starmer: This guy is a weirdo who does not know what a woman is.
But what about the substantive argument? After all, it is, actually, true to say that under the law, both in the UK, and in Ireland, some legally recognised men have cervixes, and some legally recognised women have testicles. That is because it is legal to change your gender.
The problem is that for the left, in particular, the right to change your gender is not quite enough. As they see it, the right to change your gender is also the right to make everybody else profess and believe that your new gender is your true gender. In other words, saying that somebody is a “trans man”, to indicate that they were a woman, and became a man, is offensive, because it implies that they are not really a man in the sense that say, Keir Starmer is. The left’s position is that if you do not profess to believe that such a person is just as much a man as anyone else, you are transphobic.
And this, of course, leads to all sorts of problems. Because it means that “man” and “woman” have no fixed meaning at all. They are just words we apply to ourselves depending on how we feel on a particular day. Which is how you end up in situations where what we would traditionally call “masculine” men, with beards and muscles and all the rest, are now permitted to declare themselves “women” and enter into female changing rooms, or female prisons, or female anything else.
This is also the position of the UK Labour Party under Keir Starmer.
In Ireland, it is the position of Fine Gael. And Fianna Fáil. And Sinn Fein. And Labour. And the Social Democrats. And the Greens. There is no debate about it at all here in Ireland, because all of our political parties are agreed, and the law has already been changed: In Ireland, if you say you are a woman, you are a woman. No ifs, buts, or maybes. That is why the Government refers not to “pregnant women” but instead to “pregnant people”.
In the UK, there is debate about this stuff, to the extent that the national broadcaster will ask about it. In Ireland, the voters were entirely bypassed, and all of this stuff was introduced by stealth, with the full connivance of the media, which never once highlighted it, or its consequences.