party shows its true transphobic colours

  • Post last modified:June 25, 2024
  • Reading time:18 mins read


The Labour Party is once again capitulating to bigots. Naturally, it’s another billionaire – this time one with a zeal for transphobia. Specifically, Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has offered to meet with vehement transphobe JK Rowling to “discuss her concerns” about the party’s policies on trans rights.

In other words, the party is gearing up to throw trans people under the bus some more, for a billionaire who once donated to the party.

Labour JK Rowling meeting?

On Monday 24, Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves held out a fig leaf to transphobic author JK Rowling. According to the Independent:

Labour’s Rachel Reeves said the party would meet Harry Potter author JK Rowling to provide her with “assurances” over the protection of women-only spaces.

The shadow chancellor made the offer after Rowling said at the weekend that Labour had “abandoned” her and others campaigning for women’s rights.

Specifically, Reeves made the offer in response to an article Rowling had penned for the Times. In this, she accused Labour of “abandoning” women.

By this, she didn’t mean the party’s refusal to budge on the appalling two child benefit cap which disproportionately impacts women. Nor was Rowling referring to Labour welcoming hard right Tory Elphicke. You know, the Tory that the party admitted in the knowledge that she had gone after the victims of her rapist ex-husband.

Nope. Trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) – though ‘radical’ and ‘feminist’ are a stretch – JK Rowling objects to trans people’s rights. In particular, she has harped on about trans women’s rights – because in her bigoted worldview, these pose a threat to cisgender women’s rights.

Specifically, Rowling, like the UK’s TERF brigade en masse largely fixate on trans women in single-sex spaces. The common argument goes that trans people’s rights – such as expanding gender recognition – will enable violent men to access these spaces more easily.

This is of course, palpable bullsh*t. The Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey recently pulled this argument apart:

The big argument around excluding trans women from hospital wards, toilets, changing rooms, and general life is that any man could ‘dress up as a woman’ and walk in to abuse women and kids. The problem with this though is men don’t need to do that to abuse women and kids, they just abuse them in broad daylight and people still don’t believe victims.

What’s more, it’s routinely evident that right-wing hate groups have weaponised this argument to stoke fear and division. Ultimately however, the mask regularly slips with the vile rhetoric conflating trans folks with paedophilia. It shouldn’t have to be said, but a trans person is no more likely a sexual predator than a cis person. In short, it’s barefaced bigotry masquerading as concern for women’s rights.

Rowling has racked up a torrid history of this type of transphobia in recent years. She has opined in numerous op-eds to the corporate media and spewed her anti-trans hate tirade across X to her millions of followers.

Given all this then, why exactly is Labour appealing to Rowling for her views on women’s rights?

Rolling over for Rowling and the billionaire class

People on X were wondering this exact question:

Rowling is of course a cisgender woman, so should have no business dictating policies that affect trans people:

Others wondered whether a few billion quid might be the reason Labour was loaning a listening ear:

Ultimately, it’s more proof that Starmer’s Labour is batting for the billionaires:

All the while, it ignores trans voices on this:

As some people pointed out, screwing over marginalised groups is very Starmer’s “changed” Labour. Like how it has sidelined its Black and minority MPs:

Reeves also wasn’t the only insipid Starmerite crowing to get Rowling on side. Wes Streeting couldn’t help but weigh in with his worse than worthless opinions too. But as one person on X highlighted, both did this after Rowling had attacked a trans Labour councillor on X:

Rowling supporting… the Communist Party of Britain

Of course, Labour is flirting with a hateful billionaire who isn’t even going to vote for them. Instead, Rowling has actually encouraged people to vote for the Communist Party of Britain. Predictably, this was due to the party’s bigoted positions on – you guessed it – trans rights:

The party openly opposed Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform bill, which the Tory government bulldozered in January. As Socialist Alternative explained, the Communist Party of Britain:

Under the guise of “safeguarding women and children from predatory and abusive men”, the CPB prefer the existing 2004 Gender Recognition Act, claiming it “focuses on allowing people with gender dysphoria to change their legal sex”. The GRR, by contrast, “allows anyone over the age of 16 access to a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) with no medical requirement”.

In the CPB leaderships’ mind, this is supposed to be a bad thing. What is ignored however, is the way in which the existing legislation has placed trans people in waiting lists for as long as five years while they seek medical attention.

They call for “sex” as a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act to be redefined as “biological sex”. This tears a page straight out the book of what is said currently by Tory ministers, who wish to remove existing rights and protections for trans people – even those with a 2004 certificate! Their claim to support the “right of trans people to live free from discrimination and prejudice” rings hollow.

And while Rowling might once have been a Labour Party donor, she’s more busy these days pouring her billions into her crusade against trans people.

Ironically, Labour’s attempt to attract Rowling’s support hasn’t gone very well either. First, she called on Labour to meet with a Who’s Who of transphobic lobby groups:

Although, as people on X already pointed out, Labour has already done this:

We’re old enough to remember when Labour’s shadow equalities minister Annelise Dodd’s met with the LGB Alliance. That’s because it was just last month. Somehow, this fact seems to have eluded Rowling.

Then, Rowling quoted from fellow transphobe Julie Bindel, who declared sticking with Labour as an “act of self-destruction”:

Labour Party’s transphobia

And as Labour tried to cosy up to a transphobic bigot, it has been doubling down with vile rightwing culture wars over trans people’s rights.

Here’s Starmer on Monday essentially telling the media that trans people are a “gender ideology”:

As folks on X underscored, his proposed ‘ban’ on schools teaching children about transgender identities is effectively imposing the equivalent of Section 28:

As one poster eloquently expressed, Labour is more concerned by this bogus harm to children, than the actual harm its policies will inflict:

Far from being the bastion of trans rights Rowling rails against then, in reality, the party continues to fall short. One person on X explained how Labour needs to back self-ID, because tinkering around at the edges of gender reform is a sham:

Again and again, Starmer’s spineless Labour has repeatedly shown its  contempt for marginalised communities. If you’re disabled, working class, Black, brown, Muslim, a migrant, or frankly, any oppressed minority under the sun in the UK, Labour will readily use you as a political football. Now, if it wasn’t already, it’s blatantly clear that the Labour Party will be no champion for trans people either.

Because, it’s prepared to kick aside trans people’s rights for a billionaire, with a bloated platform for her bigoted bile. JK Rowling has made trans people the singular focus of her hatred to the exclusion of all else. Similarly, Labour has made the billionaire class the singular focus of the party, and doesn’t give a toss about the rest of us. She’d be right at home, but somehow, Labour isn’t quite hateful enough for Rowling – not just yet anyway.





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