In October 2019, the Labour MP Rosie Duffield went viral. Duffield had been in Westminster for only two years, although her campaign to win the seat of Canterbury had impressed Blairites with its broad coalition of both union and cross-party support. It took a charged debate in the Commons and a high-profile speech for Duffield to find herself trending on social media for the first time.
Duffield’s breakthrough speech wasn’t about transgender people. It wasn’t about access to toilets, and it wasn’t about cervixes. It was about domestic abuse. It was about her experience of domestic abuse, by a partner she described as coercive and controlling, whom she had eventually been able to leave with the support of friends. At one point, she described abuse erupting on a weekend mini-break: “In a strange city his face changes in a way you are starting to know and dread. In a way that tells you, you need to stay calm, silent and very careful.”
In the years since, Rosie Duffield has found herself trending much more frequently, often as a bête noir of transgender activists. Many now may know her name only as a by-word for an intemperate “debate” on sex and gender.
When Labour leader Keir Starmer faced voters on BBC Question Time last week, he was tripped up not, as some male pundits predicted, by a question about his equivocations on Jeremy Corbyn, but by one about his equivocations on Duffield – which provoked an explosive intervention by JK Rowling. Debating Rishi Sunak this Wednesday, Starmer refused to even respond to a direct question about Duffield from chair Mishal Husain.
To understand the depth of Rowling’s anger, and of women who share her perspective, we need to go back to that first major parliamentary speech. It should have been the defining moment of Rosie Duffield’s career.
Colleagues wept. The Speaker, John Bercow, termed it “simultaneously horrifying and as moving a contribution” as he had heard in his 22 years in parliament. Harriet Harman, the godmother of the Labour women’s movement, said of Duffield: “What she said just now will save lives. We are incredibly proud of her.”
Here, it seemed, was an abuse survivor, who had lived the female experience of male violence and was prepared to give a voice to it. It was two years after the #MeToo movement erupted, a moment when the energy of the women’s movement, in Westminster and the world, was all about breaking silences.
Within a year, Duffield was a pariah. Her first crime was to press the “like” button on a Piers Morgan tweet in August 2020, in which the broadcaster had responded to a CNN article about “individuals with a cervix” at risk of cervical cancer, with the phrase “do you mean women?” A local opponent of Duffield – a Corbyn supporter named Sarah Cundy, formerly notorious for expressing “solidarity” with North Korea – highlighted this activity on her own feed, tweeting “add to the list of reasons Rosie Duffield needs booting, she’s a transphobe too”. Duffield challenged her, raising a question: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix….?!”
All hell broke loose. LGBT+ Labour called for Starmer to take “swift action” against Duffield. Two of Duffield’s staffers resigned. A year later, Keir Starmer was finally pinned down by Andrew Marr, who asked specifically if it was transphobic to say “only women have a cervix”. Starmer replied that “it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”
Critics of Duffield will point out that since then her language has hardened. Her later interventions range from mainstream assertions – referring to transwomen as “male-bodied biological men” – to sharing platforms with more controversial figures. A few days after Starmer disavowed her on Andrew Marr, she agreed to appear on a podcast run by Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, who has “doxed” or publicly exposed the private accounts of users of a lesbian dating site whom he believed to be transgender.
But none of this is what Starmer was asked about when Marr simply asked him in September 2021 whether it was “transphobic” to say “only women have a cervix”. None of this was at issue when Starmer replied: “It is something that should not be said.” None of it explains why he changed tack this April, accepting when asked on ITV about Duffield’s cervix comment that “biologically, she of course is right about that”.
That is why it was so galling to Duffield’s supporters when Starmer recently told Question Time that he had chosen his words to Marr because he was “worried at the time… about how the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line”. To JK Rowling, as she later wrote in The Times, “the impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hardline in Rosie’s words”.
Like Duffield, Rowling is a survivor of domestic violence. Like Duffield, she now faces violent threats. No wonder that neither woman reacts warmly to men telling them their own language is the problem. But Starmer’s answer also rankled with other gender-critical women who had been denounced by comrades in Labour and were amazed to hear Starmer suggest that he was helpfully detoxifying this debate by adding to the pile-on.
Starmer seems not to understand this anger. Before the election was called, Labour even thought they had a chance of winning Rowling’s endorsement; I believe that Labour-linked figures employed political consultants to war-game such an announcement. After Starmer’s Question Time appearance, a male friend asked me if there was any answer Starmer could have given to the question about Duffield to satisfy other gender-critical women. There was such an answer: Starmer needed to acknowledge that Duffield’s original tweet in August 2020 was legitimate speech in a free society.
Instead, Starmer made things worse by framing his position on biology as an endorsement of Tony Blair’s views “with regard to men having penises and women having vaginas”. Biological reality, it seemed, is acceptable when stated by a man (Blair); but not by a woman who has experienced its violent effects (Duffield).
Gender-critical feminists have plenty of reason to worry that Starmer still doesn’t grasp their concerns. Yet what women want in Labour most of all is an acknowledgement that they have been punished for stating facts which men – like Blair, like Starmer – now freely assert. This matters, even more than clarifying Labour’s still-muddled position on how to reform the gender recognition certificate or even its refusal to accept that the Equalities Act needs clarifying. (Despite Starmer’s denials, the terms of the Act for biological sex are sufficiently unclear that there is a judicial review working its way towards the Supreme Court.)
Women resent being ordered not to speak. This is why the actor David Tennant caused such anger this week when he said of Kemi Badenoch, the gender-critical equalities minister, “I just want her to shut up”. That is why this issue will continue to dog Starmer. He needs to apologise to Duffield, as Wes Streeting did so admirably last year, for his failures to respect her voice. That kind of apology might look like leadership.