Women shouldn’t trust Andy Burnham. Every time the question of single-sex spaces comes up, he takes the side of biological men.
Labour has already produced one prime minister, Keir Starmer, who has made a fool of himself by repeating the absurd claims of trans activists. And the prospect of another true believer in gender ideology succeeding Starmer fills me with alarm.
As yesterday’s front page of the Daily Mail emphatically reminded us, Burnham can’t see why men who self-identify as women should be excluded from women’s toilets. The legitimate anxieties of women who don’t want to share intimate spaces with men mean nothing to him.
If he recognises a conflict between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists – and I’m not at all convinced that he does – his only solution is to bleat about ‘consensus’.
We have heard this so many times. It’s a transparent attempt to swerve awkward questions about why single-sex spaces exist, as though everything could be resolved if only those pesky women were a bit nicer.
Women like me, for instance, a lifelong Labour voter until I realised that swathes of the party are much keener on trans women than actual women.
Burnham doesn’t even acknowledge that we have valid arguments, dismissing us as ‘supposed feminists’ and calling our motives into question. Now he’s being lionised by the Labour Party, as though he’s some sort of saviour who could stave off disaster at the next General Election.
To me, he looks more like a bloke who turns up with a box of Milk Tray and flowers from the local petrol station, hoping that a recently dumped woman will be grateful for the attention.
Andy Burnham described the issue of single-sex spaces as a ‘really polarised and terribly hateful debate’
The most compelling argument against him, however, is his embrace of the most woman-hating ideology I’ve encountered in years. Burnham is so wedded to ‘trans rights’ that he appears to think the subject shouldn’t even be discussed, despite ample evidence of the harm it has done to women.
He dismisses it as a ‘really polarised and terribly hateful debate’, ignoring the plight of female prisoners forced to share intimate spaces with people who still have male genitals.
‘I don’t want to see people standing up for trans rights and people supposedly standing up for women’s rights arguing on the streets of Manchester,’ he said at a meeting in 2022.
‘Supposedly’? It’s that word again, and we’ve no reason to believe he wouldn’t say the same if he becomes prime minister. And that’s why I believe a Burnham premiership would pose a risk to women’s rights.
Unlike Starmer, who reluctantly accepted last year’s Supreme Court ruling, Burnham has equivocated. While the judgment could not be clearer – single-sex spaces should be reserved for people of that biological sex – he has been critical of interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), claiming it was ‘confusing in the real world’.
The answer to that, of course, is that the minister for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson, should publish the EHRC’s updated guidance. Has Burnham urged her to get on with it? Not as far as I can see.
There’s no doubt that the Supreme Court ruling was a blow to Labour activists who believe that ‘trans women’ are entitled to go anywhere they like. There has even been some muttering about changing the law to give trans-identified men the same status as women.
Such things may sound far-fetched, but Scotland is an awful warning about the lengths politicians will go to under pressure from trans activists. After complaints from two new MSPs who identify as trans, the Scottish
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham leads Manchester Pride Parade last year
Parliament has removed information about whether MSPs are male or female from its website. Wanting to know the sex of your elected representative is, apparently, ‘transphobic’.
Scotland is, notoriously, a country whose legislators voted for a law that would have allowed men to claim the legal status of women with next to no safeguards.
The Labour leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has publicly regretted his support for what’s known as self-ID, but what about Burnham? In 2019, along with three other Labour mayors, he signed a letter calling on the Conservative government to make it easier for trans people to get a certificate stating they are legally a member of the opposite sex.
The mayors described the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) as ‘outdated’ and claimed that reform was ‘desperately needed’. The letter, which was also signed by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, argued that reform of the GRA ‘is a key step in addressing the marginalisation of trans and non-binary communities, by allowing them to more easily gain legal recognition of their gender identity’. It was an unequivocal demand for self-ID, which would have destroyed women’s right to single-sex spaces at a stroke.
Burnham’s signature was the first at the foot of the letter, which unquestioningly accepted specious claims about the ‘significant inequalities’ faced by trans people. This was never true – they have exactly the same rights as everyone else in this country – but it is even more astonishing to read in the light of recent events.
Since Burnham signed up to these claims seven years ago, we have witnessed the truly astonishing influence of trans activists on everyday life. None of us ever voted for ‘gender-neutral’ toilets. Few of us believe we should be forced to use ‘preferred pronouns’. They’ve been imposed on us by institutions that appear to live in fear of hurting the feelings of even a single trans person.
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Nurses have been disciplined for objecting to the presence of trans women in female changing rooms. Authors have been ‘disinvited’ by venues for refusing to believe biological males can magically become women.
The tide is nevertheless turning thanks to a series of legal actions. They raise urgent questions for the man who seeks to be the next PM. Does Burnham now recognise the valid objections of women who don’t want men in our spaces, regardless of how they ‘identify’? Does he fully accept the Supreme Court ruling or continue to support some form of self-ID?
Then there’s the question of ‘transing’ children.
Last year, Burnham oversaw a grant of more than £100,000 to a charity that supports access to puberty-blockers for children. A clinical trial was paused in February after a regulator expressed concerns, reflecting widespread anxiety about the practice of medicalising children with gender dysphoria (a real yet rare condition in which the sufferer believes themself to be in the ‘wrong’ body).
It’s also troubling, though unsurprising, that Burnham supports a total ban on ‘conversion therapy’, risking criminalising counsellors who take a ‘wait and see’ approach to gender-questioning clients.
Two years ago, shortly before the General Election, I left the Labour Party because I could see how many supporters of gender ideology were being selected as candidates. I was right. Membership of LGBT+ Labour, a lobby group that aggressively promotes trans ‘rights’, soared to more than 60 MPs in the new Parliament. They’re swimming against public opinion, which is increasingly opposed to the demands of men who claim to have changed sex.
No doubt many MPs would support Burnham, if he manages to get back into Parliament. But they need to think about the wider public, who have no time for this nonsense. Andy Burnham is a relic of Labour’s inglorious recent past, not its future.
- Joan Smith is an author and commentator.
