UK politics is in a fugue state over trans ideology

Every UK political party is split over the trans issue

Transgender ideology is tearing apart every single political party – now even the Tories.

Party leaders argued last year that teachers must be able to maintain discretion over policy on what to do about students claiming to be trans in their schools. However, in recent weeks this has caused a split behind Cabinet doors. Rumour has it that Education Secretary Gillian Keegan had given schools the green light to conceal children’s social transition (new name, new pronouns) from parents, and to allow admit male-born children to girls’ toilets despite clear legal guidance to the contrary.

When it comes to children choosing to ‘socially transition’ and identify as the opposite sex while in school, the concerns of teachers as well as parents are being disregarded.

The Tories now join a disunited Labour Party, divided down the middle over the issue of trans rights – or, rather, the rights of male-bodied transwomen to invade women-only spaces.

Take a very telling public incident last month. My friend Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, was in the Commons, speaking about the shutting down of women’s opposition to transgender ideology in the aftermath of the SNP’s disastrous Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland.

As she defended the need to protect vulnerable women in single-sex spaces, fellow Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a self-declared ‘trans ally’, appeared visibly angry as he took to his feet and began to rail against women who raised such concerns.

It was an astonishing spectacle, a blatant act of misogyny, and – coupled with the steadfast refusal of Keir Starmer to speak out against it and other such bullying – one that will only turn away women voters.

We have long memories. I believe it may well be the moment that the party is denied a landslide in 2024.

Meanwhile, the SNP is in utter disarray following a trans policy storm of its own making.

Last week, when Nicola Sturgeon, previously hailed as one of the most successful politicians of the decade, was asked by a journalist ‘Are all transwomen women?’, she faltered and seemed unusually flustered.

How could she possibly say ‘Yes’ when talking about Adam Graham, the double rapist who was arrested as a man and appeared at early court hearings under that name before changing it to Isla Bryson.

Just days after the SNP won a vote in favour of gender reform legislation that would allow people to change legal sex, Graham had been placed at a woman’s prison – but after a huge, angry outcry from feminists and other concerned citizens, now resides in a male wing of a prison.

Sturgeon has yet to commit to whether she thinks the rapist is a man or a woman.

On Thursday night, an SNP panellist on BBC One’s Question Time was shouted down by audience members after repeatedly refusing to answer the same question.

The Greens lost all credibility over the trans issue long ago, while the Women’s Equality Party – formed in 2015 supposedly to support the rights of women – voted at its last conference in favour of a motion supporting gender self-ID.

In practise, it would mean men could declare themselves to be women based on nothing more than a ‘feeling’.

I am going to hazard a guess at why trans ideology has captured every single political party in the UK. These politicians, aside from some notable exceptions, appear to have capitulated to the bullying and persistence of Queer Isis.

Trans extremism – the intimidation, violence and smears aimed at those who reject the radical gender ideologues – has been the biggest threat to women’s rights in a century.

And yet a generation of MPs has bought into it. I have never seen such cowardice within our political system, and I hope to never witness it again.

As a longstanding feminist campaigner I believe that the reason this issue has come to dominate the political landscape of late is because of women’s resistance to the misogyny that underpins the transgender ideology.

As the Scottish resisters say: ‘Women won’t wheesht.’

While the question ‘Who on earth should a right-thinking person vote for?’ remains moot, at least one matter has been settled.

It seems the era of ‘no debate’, imposed on public life by the trans lobby group Stonewall, is officially over.

Politicians need to recognise that that the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is now recognised as the ludicrous, flat-earth statement that it is. The entire house of cards is collapsing, and our political parties need to catch up.

The country is no longer in a fugue state when it comes to transgender doctrine – and I look forward to the day when every political leader roundly denounces it.