The clash between women’s rights and transgender issues may be a looming problem as the United Kingdom’s new Labour Party prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, begins his tenure at 10 Downing Street.
The left-of-center Labour Party won a landslide victory on Thursday after 14 years of Conservative Party governance. Labour won a whopping 412 out of 650 seats, marking the party’s best showing since the days of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But Starmer has previously found himself in a complex situation when it comes to supporting the position that biological males who identify as women are equivalent to biological women.
In 2021, Starmer clashed with Rosie Duffield, a fellow Labour Party member of Parliament, over whether only women have cervixes, a dispute which has become known as “cervix-gate.”
Duffield, who also won reelection Thursday, came under fire in 2021 after criticizing a Twitter post that used the phrase “individuals with a cervix” instead of the word “women.”
Starmer, head of the Labour Party at the time, said it was “not right” to say that only women have cervixes.
In April 2023, Starmer received heat for saying that 99.9% of women “of course haven’t got a penis” but a “very small number” of people who identify with a different gender than their biological sex must be given sufficient medical care and social dignity according to their self-identity.
Starmer echoed similar thoughts in a 2022 interview with the Telegraph, saying that for most women, identifying as a woman is a straightforward biological process, but for others, it is not as clear-cut.
“I also think the discussion should be less toxic,” Starmer said in 2022. “It’s just got so divided, and the moment anybody expresses a view or even inquires, there’s an immediate shutdown, and I just think that’s unhealthy in politics.”
In his 2022 interview, Starmer also said he believed in certain sex-segregated spaces for women, understanding their importance after having worked with victims of sexual violence.
But Labour political strategists have been warning for over a year that Starmer and others in his party would lose in a general election if they did not deal sufficiently with the so-called “woman problem,” especially on the matter of whether an individual can simply self-identify as the opposite sex.
JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and outspoken women’s rights advocate, explained in a piece in the Times last month why she would struggle to vote Labour in the coming election. The piece cited multiple other members of Parliament, not just Starmer, who also struggled to walk the line on transgender rights versus women’s rights.
Rowling recalled how during the cervix-gate fiasco, the Labour Party did not just see “the rights of women as disposable but struggled to say what a woman was at all.”
The U.K. has also been at the forefront of the debate over whether gender transition medicine is safe for children.
In April, the National Health Service sponsored the writing of a 388-page report on gender transition medicine by Hilary Cass, a longtime pediatrician and the president of the Royal College of Pediatrics.
The three-year project, known as the Cass Report, found that the affirmation model of treating gender dysphoria, especially among minors, is “built on shaky foundations” and evidence that is “exaggerated or misrepresented.”
Following the release of the Cass Report, but not directly as a result of it, Starmer said in April that his views on transgender issues “start with biology.”
“As a country, we’re a pretty reasonable, tolerant bunch, and most people know that there are a small number of individuals who do not identify with the gender that they were born into,” Starmer said this spring.
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Starmer acknowledged that many people who identify as transgender have experienced significant amounts of trauma and that, when possible, accommodations should be made out of respect.
“I do not accept this is an issue that cannot be resolved with respect and dignity,” Starmer said in April.