Why Labour still can’t be trusted on trans

Is Labour finally seeing sense on trans? According to this weekend’s Sunday Times, Keir Starmer’s UK government is mothballing its plans to streamline the process of legally changing gender. Labour’s reforms were floated before last year’s General Election, but party sources have now revealed that the plans are being quietly dropped.

This is a welcome u-turn. Labour’s gender reforms would have made it significantly easier to get a ‘gender-recognition certificate’ (GRC), which allows men to be treated as women and vice versa, in almost all circumstances. Under the current requirements, to get a GRC you need to have lived in your adopted gender for at least two years, and have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a panel of clinicians and lawyers. Under Labour’s proposals, the panel would be replaced by a single doctor. Gender-critical campaigners have described this proposal as essentially introducing self-ID by the backdoor.

Although self-ID has never been the law of the land in the UK, institutions from hospitals to prisons to sporting bodies seem to have acted like it is. Countless horror stories have emerged in recent years of men being allowed to violate women’s spaces, even without having legally changed their gender. Only a minuscule proportion of Britons who identify as trans hold a GRC (as of last year, only 7,000 had ever been issued since the Gender Recognition Act introduced them in 2004). Labour’s reforms, by increasing the take-up of GRCs, would make it even more difficult than it already is to maintain single-sex spaces. It beggars belief that this was ever on the table.

Still, we shouldn’t mistake this about-turn for a genuine change of heart. The trans activists at the top of the Labour Party have not suddenly recognised the importance of women’s rights. As the report in The Sunday Times makes clear, the reforms have been shelved not as a matter of principle, but in a fit of panic over the rise of the populists.

As a government insider put it, if Labour were to try to bring in something approaching self-ID, this would be ‘catnip’ for Nigel Farage, whose Reform Party has recently begun to overtake Labour in some polls. The UK government also fears that pursuing an overtly pro-trans agenda will anger US president Donald Trump, who is currently pushing through numerous executive orders to protect sex-based rights. Apparently, Labour is also worried about attracting the attention of Trump’s ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, whose relentless tweeting about grooming gangs earlier this year clearly rattled Downing Street.

So no, Labour’s u-turn on self-ID is sadly not an indication that the government is seeing sense on gender ideology. In fact, it seems to be quite happy to kowtow to trans activists’ demands in other areas. For starters, a ‘trans inclusive’ ban on LGBT conversion therapy is still in the offing. If passed, this could effectively make it a crime to question someone’s transgender identity. Any doctor, therapist, parent or teacher could risk breaking the law by asking someone to think twice about transitioning. Labour has also refused to define ‘sex’ as meaning ‘biological sex’ in the Equality Act, weakening women’s legal right to keep their spaces single-sex.

What all this shows is that Labour’s higher-ups know that gender ideology is hated by the voters, but they will continue to push it when they think they can get away with it. Labour still cannot be trusted to do right by women.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.