How Labour’s cervix problem began

A transphobia row over cervixes, which began in July last year, is still plaguing the Labour Party more than a year later.

The story first made headlines in summer 2020 after the Labour MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield, used Twitter to weigh in on a debate over the American Cancer Society updating its guidelines to include the phrase “individuals with a cervix”. Replying to a tweet by CNN that shared the new recommendations, broadcaster Piers Morgan asked “Do you mean women?”, a post that Duffield then liked.

In response to the social media backlash that resulted from this, the MP – who stood down from her frontbench role in May 2020 after admitting that she broke lockdown rules – then tweeted: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix...?!”

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Duffield followed this up with another tweet describing “the implication that one cannot describe oneself as a woman without inviting a pile-on” as “beyond ridiculous now”, the Evening Standard reported. The Labour Campaign for Trans Rights condemned her comments for being “inaccurate” and “transphobic”.

This July, Duffield found herself on the culture wars frontline once again after liking a tweet by American rapper Kurtis Tripp that accused transgender people of “colonising gay culture” and described them as “mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as gay”. This provoked fury from LGBT+ Labour activists and led to an investigation by party officials.

As the BBC explained, “some LGBT+ groups... say trans men and women should be treated the same as biological men and women”.

But, the broadcaster added, “Duffield believes that biological females should have protected spaces where biological males are not allowed to go – such as domestic violence refuges and prisons”.

Speaking to The Times in October 2020 Duffield – herself a victim of domestic abuse – said that the vitriol she received for her tweets made her feel like she was living in Gilead, the dystopian setting of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “Men seem to have a space or a door with the word ‘man’ on, then women have ‘women and anyone else’,” she said. “Why are we encroaching on women’s spaces but not men’s?”

The threats and abuse Duffield has received on social media over the past year led her to pull out of the annual Labour Party conference, which began in Brighton on Saturday. “It’s hard to know how serious to take threats by people who post them online,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, adding: “but they’re pretty awful, and I did not want to subject myself and other people to that kind of abuse.”

Duffield said that as it was Labour leader Keir Starmer’s first conference speech since the pandemic, she “really did not want to be the news story” and felt that her attendance would lead her to become the “centre of attention”, The Guardian reported.

Her comments and decision to pull out of the conference put pressure on Starmer to clarify the party’s take on transgender issues – a topic he has famously remained tight-lipped on, much to the frustration of LGBT+ voters. Many have interpreted his silence over the past year “as fear of associating with a ‘woke’ cause, and losing more socially conservative voters because of it”, reported the LGBT+ site Pink News.

During an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Starmer made his most forthright comments on the row so far. Claiming that only women have cervixes was “something that shouldn't be said” and was “not right”, he said.

The Labour leader declined to call Duffield’s remarks transphobic, although he added that we need to “bear in mind that the trans community are amongst the most marginalised and abused communities”.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid promptly used Twitter to accuse Starmer of a “total denial of scientific fact”, while The Telegraph said he was “pandering to the trans lobby”.

The battle over what some see as Labour’s institutional transphobia and others consider to be a battle over women’s rights continues to rage on, with the issue likely to be a hot topic during this week’s conference and far beyond.