Gender, Recognition

"Is anyone with a cervix by definition a woman?" is a yes-no question to which any answer other than yes is no, just as "Can a man have a cervix?" is a yes-no question to which any answer other than no is yes. Boris Johnson's bluster to Darren McCaffrey has established conclusively that he denies biological reality in order to deprive, primarily, women and girls of their hard won sex-based rights.

All to maintain his own right to sex. The best thing about Richard Holden is that, for all his obvious ability and ambition, he will never be a Minister while Carrie Antoinette has any say in the matter. Nevertheless, I am fully prepared to be North West Durham's only parliamentary candidate who stated the fact that anyone with a cervix was by definition a woman. The denial of that fact is Thatcherism to the utmost, according to which a man, or a woman, can literally be self-made. That was why no one had ever heard of it when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

Liz Truss or anyone else can say anything she likes to, of all things, the Conservative Party Conference. Fobbing that off is the point of the event. After all these decades, how are law and order coming along? The same goes for the right-wing papers. "It wouldn't be right to have self-identification with no checks and balances,” she tells the Daily Telegraph. What checks and balances, exactly? No in-the-club reporter was crude enough to ask her. Well, of course not. Just as, of course, she did not say that it would not be right to have self-identification at all.

Unheard of in the long ago days of Labour or even the Liberal Democrats in government, self-identification entered the discourse through Maria Miller's Women and Equalities Select Committee; she had previously been Minister for Women and Equalities while Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. It has marched on unobstructed ever since, without anything so vulgar as a parliamentary vote. Who needs to amend the Gender Recognition Act?

Oliver Dowden can make as many cheap jibes as he pleases against "cancel culture" and the "woke", while Sajid Javid can tweet as many cheap jokes as he likes at Keir Starmer. Javid is the Secretary of State for Health, a policy area in which gender self-identification is now completely entrenched, as it is in education and in criminal justice. And Dowden was until very recently the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Enough said.