This new health minister thinks you can identify as a llama

It may sound like a tired punchline, but it really is true: the new junior health minister in the UK Labour government actually believes that people should be able to self-identify as llamas.

Ashley Dalton, drafted in to replace the now cancelled Andrew Gwynne as the minister for public health and prevention, revealed her apparent support for trans-species self-identification back in 2016. During an exchange on Twitter, when asked if people should be taken seriously if they declare themselves to be llamas, Dalton said: ‘Yes. And treat [them] with respect and dignity.’

Of course, what Dalton hadn’t twigged is that her Twitter interlocutor was having a laugh at her expense. Presumably, she had fallen so far down the ‘trans rights’ rabbit hole that she no longer recognised the patent absurdity of identifying yourself as another species.

Dalton’s other tweets on gender suggest this is the case. She has also insisted that ‘if you identify as female then you are’, regardless of ‘the associated bits’. She has claimed that trans-identified men are ‘not male’, but ‘women’. And she has argued for the complete abolition of single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms. ‘Personally, I think we shouldn’t have gendered bathrooms at all’, she once tweeted.

For all Labour’s recent attempts to present itself as a moderate voice in the trans debate, comments like Dalton’s remind us of where the party really stands. After all, we shouldn’t forget that current prime minister Keir Starmer once speculated that one in 1,000 women might have a penis. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has backed placing male rapists in women’s prisons. Former shadow equalities minister Dawn Butler once infamously declared, with a straight face on live television, that children are born without a sex.

That Starmer can appoint a health minister who doesn’t believe in biological sex, or even biological species, shows that Labour is still a party of trans-activist cranks.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.