Left at War With Itself: Labour Fight Over Trans People on All-Women Shortlists Turns Ugly

Labour
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Virginia Hale

Feminist Labour members behind a campaign to stop individuals who have not legally changed gender from featuring on the party’s all-women shortlists have been branded “fascists” and “vile human beings”.

Activists responded with fury to news of the crowdfunding campaign set up by female Labour activists, which has so far raised more than £16,000 to fund legal challenges against transgender-identifying males from inclusion on the shortlists — a form of positive discrimination used to boost the number of female MPs.

“Comrades, we are a group of Labour women who want to ensure all-women shortlists (AWS) remain reserved for females and that women’s representation in the party increases,” reads the GoFundMe page, which has received just under 7,000 shares since its creation on January 12.

“We believe that the election of self-identifying transwomen as women’s officers and their inclusion on all-women shortlists is reducing and undermining female representation in the Labour party,” the campaign’s creators added.

The activists said any money raised through the crowdfunding site which is left over after legal fees would be spent fighting to “keep women’s spaces female-only” and proposed changes to Britain’s gender identity laws, which the group warns could open the door to men who “self-identify” as women granted access to areas including women’s changing room, hospital wards, prisons, and domestic violence shelters.

Far-left activists took to Twitter to demand that Labour expel the women behind the campaign, with Northern Ireland Green Party equality officer Alex Moore calling for the party also to remove “anyone who colludes” with the GoFundMe page’s author, Jennifer James.

“Her transphobic & transmisogynistic bigotry should be treated as nothing less than violence against trans people”, asserted the Green representative, who goes by the screen name ‘borders are racist yall’.

“They don’t just ‘have their own opinion’ on gender, they want to f****** exterminate all trans people,” added Moore, in a lengthy rant against women who are against free access to women-only spaces for “self-identifying” transgender people.

Labour’s all-women shortlists are already open to transgender people who have legally changed their gender to female.

Campaigners behind the GoFundMe campaign outlined on the page that they are “committed to trans people, as a marginalised group, living free from discrimination and violence”, but said they are opposed to the party giving males who ‘self-identify’ as transgender representation “at the expense of female candidates”.

The Labour party issued a statement Thursday afternoon that only transgender individuals in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate which says they are a woman will be eligible for all-women shortlists.

Government proposals to allow people to legally change sex have brought out hostilities between old-school feminists who say biological differences have a bearing on sex and LGBT activists who claim such beliefs amount to “violence” against transgender individuals.

In September, feminists meeting at Speakers Corner to discuss the implications for women of proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act were attacked by transgender activists who shouted: “Kill all TERFS”  — a derogatory term that stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

Breitbart London reported at the time how 61-year-old grandmother Maria MacLachlan was punched and kicked by transgender militants, one of whom bragged on Facebook about wanting “to f*** some terfs up” on an event page where they planned to interrupt the feminists’ meet-up.

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