The United Kingdom’s Labour Party has abandoned the policy of self-identification — that is, allowing people to change their legal gender simply by filling out a form.

But it has done so out of political necessity, not principle.

Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, said that he had “reflected on what happened in Scotland,” by which he is referring to the Scottish National Party’s wildly unpopular attempt to introduce self-ID legislation and the British government’s rare use of its veto power to overrule it. Starmer says he has concluded that “we don’t think that self-identification is the right way forward.”

This is the same man who has previously said that while most women do not have penises, a very small minority do, and “trans women are women.”

Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, writes in the Guardian that her party remains “committed to modernizing the Gender Recognition Act” to make it easier to change legal genders.

The current process also requires a panel of anonymous doctors to decide something of momentous significance, based on reams of intrusive medical paperwork and evidence of any surgery. This is demeaning for trans people and meaningless in practice. A diagnosis provided by one doctor, with a registrar instead of a panel, should be enough.

This is essentially self-ID, with the added hoop of requiring one to obtain a doctor’s note to say one has gender dysphoria.

Still, Dodds’s remark that “we need to recognize that sex and gender are different,” and her promise to continue to ensure that “biological women” have women-only spaces, show that Labour is on the back foot.