Final proof that party I once loved is hopelessly out of touch (2025)

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I was once a member of the Labour Party – but not any more. I left in 2021, the day that David Lammy dismissed women’s rights campaigners like me as ‘dinosaurs... hoarding their rights’. For good measure, he claimed that men can grow a cervix.

I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right – and frankly what the vast majority of the public feels is right – that I could no longer support it.

The Supreme Court ruling should have been a wake-up call for Labour but the party has shown itself to be hopelessly out of touch once again.

The silence from the PM on such a socially transformative ruling is tin-eared enough. But now the likes of Home Office Minister Dame Angela Eagle are plotting to thwart the judgment in a cowardly WhatsApp group of Labour MPs.

Comments like hers that ‘some public bodies are overreacting’ to the ruling are dangerous, particularly for organisations having to implement the court’s findings.

Has the British Transport Police, in announcing it would amend its strip-search guidelines, ‘overreacted’? Of course not, and to say so is deliberately misleading, but it shows how deep the rot has set in.

On and on this WhatsApp group goes, its members burying their heads deeper and deeper in the sand. The Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Baroness Falkner, is branded ‘appalling’ after she welcomed the ruling’s ‘clarity’ in a radio interview.

Are these politicians saying that they are going to ignore what the law says? You either act according to the law or you break the law.

Even after the ruling, Health Minister Karin Smyth struggled to answer when asked whether trans women should be able to use female-only changing rooms.

Women’s Minister Bridget Phillipson may have said that the ruling brings ‘clarity and confidence’, but her disingenuous comment that Labour has ‘always supported the protection of single-sex spaces based on biological sex’ is nothing short of gaslighting.

Labour peer Harriet Harman, herself one of the architects of the Equality Act, high-handedly declared the verdict ‘correctly interprets’ current legislation – as if to say that the ruling was what Labour had always meant.

This is the party that pledged at the election to halve violence against women, but how – if it cannot still define what a woman is?

It’s insulting to those, like me, who have spent years caught up in this Kafkaesque debate – and suffered for it. As an academic accused of transphobia and hounded out of my job with the Open University, I have suffered death threats and online harassment.

Last year, I successfully sued my former employers but not before I’d been driven to breaking point.

So to be in the public gallery at the Supreme Court last week was utterly electrifying.

The ruling was simple: that women are a category of people who deserve respect and dignity, and trans people are a category who deserve respect and dignity. But Labour didn’t get the memo.

One day, if and when the party gets itself out of this mess, I may rejoin. But, by failing to keep up with the law, they are the ones in danger of being branded dinosaurs.

Jo Phoenix is a professor of criminology and co-founder of Open University’s Gender Critical Research Network.

Bridget PhillipsonThe Home OfficeLabour

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