Is it now too dangerous for women to vote Labour?

Labour used to be the obvious choice for a certain kind of woman – middle class, thoughtful, desirous of feeling like a good person. But then came the trans movement, and the take-up by “progressives” of an ideology as bizarre as it was offensive and frightening: that anybody who says they’re a woman is one. This includes men – some of whom are killers, sadists, rapists and who, by insisting they are women, gain access to their prisons, hospital wards, changing rooms, swimming pools and so on. Part of this madness is the insistence that childbearing and breastfeeding are somehow not a matter of womanhood – that those who breastfeed are mere “chest-feeders” as some woke hospital guidance has suggested.

Well, many Labour-voting women don’t like all this. They are offended – deeply so. I know a number of Left-wing ladies who are so disgusted by the trans lobby’s hold over our would-be rulers that they feel they just can’t vote for Labour. The antics of Anneliese Dodds, the shadow women and equalities minister, have hardly reassured this constituency. Last week, she suggested that she wanted to make it easier for people to officially change gender. This kind of pledge is puzzlingly bad politics, as Nicola Sturgeon found out when she introduced a self-ID law in Scotland and it blew up in her face.

That Dodds is meant to be standing up for women, while apparently desperate to make it easier for biological males to go into women’s changing rooms, is not an irony lost on the many women Labour will need to win.

Once again JK Rowling has made matters plain, calling Keir Starmer insincere about trans issues after Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield was not invited to his election launch event in Kent. Her crime? Saying that only women have cervixes and trans women are not women? Yet this is exactly what female voters want to hear.