Parties are in trouble if they can’t use c-word

I don't really get this debate. Yes, women have cervixes – as do trans men. Just seems like a rather spiteful question to trap politicians into saying 'you're not really a man'.

Arguing technicalities like this just comes across as telling an adopted child, 'ye but those aren't your real parents though lol'. Factually true but doesn't really matter.

Angela Rayner been talking about Tories again?

Go from reviewing PS2 ports to being in the Times merely by hating the trans community.

What a grift

I particularly like the turn of phrase she uses that he could have admitted that Duffield was wrong and still insist she wasn't transphobic when what she was wrong about is an old transphobic dog whistle that always ignores trans men. It shows that the hatred is towards trans women and that trans men are a mere afterthought to the bigots. Just like the phrase used in this article "radical trans activists".

On the plus side it's good to see The Times come out with another article demonising trans people and those who defend them. It's been almost a full 3 or 4 days since the last one. I'm sure their readers were wondering what their editorial stance on it was.

Still no opinion piece on Bell v Tavistock being overturned though I see. Wonder why that is?

And this is apparently more important tha...

Oh, ok. Perhaps it's the most important thing you can attack Labour with if you're deflecting from the absolute shitshow we have going on under the Tories' watch. But enough about the Tories, when will the petrol stations have petrol in em again? Cervices? Fucking sort out the services!

Shame on transphobes/terfs stirring up so many lies and misnformation about trans people that this is even an issue. Obsessive lunatics.

One word has dominated Labour’s 2021 conference. In a different world, where Labour was capable of landing a blow on the government, that word might have been “shortages”: there are gaps on supermarket shelves, roads are clogged with panicked drivers queueing for fuel, and energy companies crumble as gas prices soar. Or it could have been “cuts”, given that the Tories are about to remove the £20 boost to universal credit amid warnings that thousands face poverty.

But neither of those will be the defining word of this week for Labour. Instead, all anybody wants to talk about is “cervix”. In every interview of a Labour politician, there’s a question about the C-word: is it transphobic to say, as the Labour MP Rosie Duffield once tweeted, that only women have a cervix? Canvassers report that out on the doorstep, voters are now demanding answers on the party’s cervix policy. Labour may want to talk political philosophy and even psephology, but all it’s getting back is gynaecology.

On the plus side, I definitely won’t forget I’m booked in for a smear test this week. On the minus, has any party ever walked itself into such a staggeringly unnecessary humiliation? On Sunday, when Andrew Marr first put the cervix question to Sir Keir Starmer, it should not have been a surprise. The harassment of Duffield for her tweet, and her subsequent decision that she felt too unsafe to attend conference, had been front page news the previous weekend. This was not a cervical ambush.

The Sunday before, Marr had pinned down the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey on whether “Woman: adult human female” is an offensive phrase. (A Lib Dem activist has been banned from holding office for ten years after wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan). Davey was slippery and evasive. He refused to say what was wrong with the statement, and instead talked about the dangers faced by trans people. He did not mention that women also face violence and discrimination, even though it was only days after the south London teacher Sabina Nessa had been killed.

Surely, with this fair warning, Starmer could do better. Instead, he rushed directly into the trap. “Is it transphobic to say ‘only women have a cervix?’” asked Marr. “It is something that shouldn’t be said,” replied Starmer. Asked to explain why it shouldn’t be said, however, Starmer declined to elaborate. Perhaps, like many who have taken on the pieties of modern gender identity, he does not even really understand why “only women have a cervix” became taboo — only that it is unsayable.

Any politician who had bothered to get to grips with gender identity as a policy issue would know there’s a way to answer Marr’s question. You could acknowledge that there are trans men, who have the female anatomy they were born with and so aren’t accounted for in Duffield’s phrase; but at the same time, you could affirm that it’s unfair to call Duffield transphobic, and make a commitment to balancing the rights of women and trans people.

After all, most people beyond the activist core use and understand “woman” and “man” to mean “female” and “male”. That doesn’t mean they’re engaged in hatred of trans people. It means that they’re regular citizens using language in the regular way. To the average voter, “only women have a cervix” is a banal anatomical truth. Telling them it’s now offensive is alienating; refusing even to say why it’s offensive is downright insulting.

And still, Labour MPs failed to figure out their line. When the radio host Nick Ferrari asked it of the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves on Monday morning, she stuttered and prevaricated and eventually said: “I don’t even know how to answer that question.” Well, obviously. Ian Murray, shadow secretary of state for Scotland, complained that he was being asked for a “medical science thesis” when the topic came up on Woman’s Hour, then hedged his way around the issue. It took till lunchtime for Emily Thornberry to give something resembling a coherent answer on BBC television’s Politics Live.

It has been more than five years since the transgender equality inquiry, conducted by the Commons women and equalities committee under the leadership of Maria Miller, brought radical trans activist demands such as gender self-identification and the abolition of single-sex spaces into Westminster. This issue has been brewing for a long time, and politicians should not be acting as if a piano has fallen from the ceiling whenever the question comes up.

Nor can Labour dismiss concerns about vocabulary as a niche preoccupation. The Lancet, the medical journal, balked at putting the word “woman” on the cover of its latest issue and instead used the phrase “bodies with vaginas”. If you were looking for something to be offended by, this was probably a better candidate than Duffield’s tweet, given the dehumanising way it breaks women down into component organs. This is the voice of the medical profession deciding “woman” is a dirty word, too exclusionary to be printed.

Sajid Javid was among the many Conservatives to jump on the cervix bandwagon, accusing Starmer of a “total denial of scientific fact”. But it’s not just a useful stick to beat Labour with. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a line of defence in those “blue wall” constituencies Davey has his eye on, the once-safe Tory seats growing disillusioned and flirting with the Lib Dems. However clapped out the Tories look, they’re going to be difficult to dislodge as long as they’re the only party speaking a language voters understand.

So what is Javid going to do about the NHS stance that not only women have a cervix? Or that the equality act says you can't discriminate on gender expression?

Oh nothing, is it just bluster?

If so isn't that pathetic.

I'm a little unsure why some other women feel their identity as such is threatened or disrespected if someone says a trans man who has a cervix is a man.

I acknowledge that for some women, their womanhood is entirely based on biology. That's fine, that's their experience, their life, their choice, their reality. My womanhood is not based entirely on my biology and I feel no less a woman if I recognise that some people with the same anatomy as me are men. I feel no less a woman if I recognise that some people with different anatomy to me are also women.

It’s not that complicated. Most, but not all, people who are biologically female and some intersex people have cervixes. Gender is, for some people, independent of biological sex and so any firm assertion isn’t strictly correct. Do most women have cervixes? Yes. Are most people with cervixes women? Yes. It’s that simple.

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