Pity poor Keir Starmer. People keep asking him a very hard question — what is a woman? — despite the fact that a) he’s already answered it and b) no one really cares, apart from a bunch of people who don’t have penises (if only there were a word for them). 

In the words of LBC’s Henry Riley, Starmer is “exasperated” by it all. After all, he’s been very clear: 99.9 per cent (or thereabouts) of women lack penises whereas the remaining 0.1 per cent have them. Thus there’s not anything all women have in common (apart from being called “women”) but that’s okay, isn’t it?

After all, it’s not as though the penis-less women have any specific needs or shared interests (other than, perhaps, penis envy). Yes, some of us might have worried about “being erased” — that is, being ousted from the Barbie pink sleepover club that is “womanhood” — but Starmer has reassured us on this score. We might not have dicks to whip out on Friday night telly, but no one’s going to take away our Woman Cards yet. 

If you do this for one lie, will you do it for another?

I have to admit that I, too, am exasperated by all of this. It’s a farce. Keir Starmer knows what a woman is, and he knows that we know he knows. In the end, everyone knows, just as everyone knows that denying the political salience of biological sex is neither trivial nor irrelevant to everyday lives. 

The “what is a woman?” question is not conceptually difficult. One does not need a doctorate in linguistics, biology or philosophy to answer it. Politically and morally, however, it is a nightmare — because it is a test. It asks, whose side are you on? Are you willing to demonstrate your commitment to this side by telling an obvious lie? Are you fully trained in all the ways of justifying the lie? Are you prepared to cast those who tell the truth as ignorant, selfish, aggressive, lacking in compassion? If you do this for one lie, will you do it for another? 

Starmer has attempted to get around this with waffle about “toxic divides” and penis-ownership per centages. His attempts have not worked. Had he been listening to feminists, he’d have known they’d never work. Instead of treating us as hysterical idiots, he could have talked to us and understood why women’s rights cannot be safeguarded in the absence of a stable definition of “woman” — and why there is no way of saying this that will not get you vilified. Instead, he thought he could be the voice of reason, swooping in to “create some common sense frameworks for the discussion”. 

I realise that feminists are supposed to be more grateful. After all, unlike some of his colleagues, he’s not called organisations such as Woman’s Place UK a hate group — can’t we cut him some slack? Just as trans activists remain oblivious to how much effort feminists have put into understanding their position, Starmer fails to recognise the degree to which we have given him the benefit of the doubt. 

Like many feminists, I have long believed that the left is our natural home, on the basis that there can be no liberation without a significant redistribution of resources. It has dismayed me to see women ourselves — not just our bodies, but our words, our stories, even our suffering — treated as resources to be “redistributed” amongst males who feel they deserve such things more than us. Yet the moment women on the left have questioned this, we have been told we are right-wingers who do not deserve economic parity or reproductive rights, perhaps even that we deserve to be raped. This has been painful and enraging. The likes of Starmer should be impressed at the restraint women have shown in the face of this. Our fears are proven, not misplaced. 

Either remove feminists from the party, or be accused of trans genocide

In spite of this, many of us will still vote Labour come the next election. We will do it on the basis that human dependency is more important than the rampant individualism embraced by the Tories. We might yet vote for a party that denigrates women as a class because bodies matter, we don’t define ourselves in a vacuum, and oppression is more than an identity. There’s a bitter irony in this, however, because these very reasons form the basis of why feminists are right about gender identity, and trans activists are wrong. Starmer can count on the support of many of the women he’s patronised and neglected. I am not sure the same can be said for the activists he tries to appease, for whom nothing will ever be enough.

If Starmer had spoken out sooner — if he hadn’t treated feminists as moral and intellectual inferiors, trans activists as mystic emissaries from Planet Gender — it might have been easier for him to give an honest answer to the question that so exasperates him now. He tried to square a circle, even though women far more intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful than him had already demonstrated that this couldn’t be done. 

Now Starmer has very few choices. Either he says “woman” is nothing more than a gender identity, or he will be called a fascist. Either he removes feminists from his party, or he will be deemed responsible for actual violence. Either he agrees that Eddie Izzard is in fact a woman called Suzy who would have been killed by the Nazis, or he will be accused of trans genocide. Sorry, Keir. Feminists didn’t make the rules. 

Even so, we will be blamed for said rules on the basis that we should have kept quiet. It’s easy to blame feminists because we’re not going to threaten to kill you. We’re not going to call you Hitler. Some of us will give you our votes. It’s almost as though we’re the only people who understand the value of compromise. 

Starmer can listen to feminists or not. Either way, I suspect his attempt at compromise has already damned him with trans activists, for whom any association between bodies and gender politics is impermissible. He will be hung out to dry just as feminists were, though at least for the latter, it is because we acted with integrity. For Starmer, it will all have been for nothing.