Keir Starmer has finally – and belatedly – welcomed last week’s Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of womanhood. Earlier today, the UK prime minister proudly declared to the media that a woman is an ‘adult female’. The message he wants to send is clear: he now identifies as a champion of women’s rights and as a believer in biological reality.
Whether or not we should buy this volte-face, given Starmer’s many years of pushing gender ideology, one thing can be said for certain: his transition to common sense has been long, torturous and, at times, hilarious. Here are some of his maddest statements on gender:
A ‘desperate’ need for self-ID
In the early days of his Labour leadership, Starmer rarely missed an opportunity to pander to trans activists. At the PinkNews Awards in 2020, the then opposition leader claimed there was a ‘desperate need… to introduce self-declaration for transgender people’. He explicitly pledged to implement self-ID a year later.
Self-ID would have allowed people to change their legal sex through self-declaration alone. Although it has never been law, its adoption by various institutions is what led so many potentially predatory men to be let into women’s prisons, women’s hospital wards and women’s changing rooms. It was among the nuttiest and most dangerous demands of the gender loons – and the supposedly sensible Starmer backed it to the hilt.
It’s ‘not right’ to say a man can’t have a cervix
Starmer once felt so strongly that transwomen are women and transmen are men that he chastised then Labour MP Rosie Duffield for daring to say that only women have a cervix. In 2021, when asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr about Duffield’s apparent heresy, Starmer lashed out that it was ‘not right’ and ‘something that shouldn’t be said’.
Still, at least he stopped short of now foreign secretary David Lammy’s eyebrow-raising claim that men can ‘grow’ a cervix if supplied with the right hormones.
It’s ‘actually the law’ that transwomen are women
In the days when Starmer would gladly profess that ‘transwomen are women’, he would also insist the law was on his side. Speaking to The Times in 2022, he said that the notion that transwomen are women is ‘not just my view – that is actually the law’, citing ‘the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act’. Of course, this is the very confusion that the Supreme Court corrected last week. Despite Starmer’s lengthy legal career, it’s clear his grasp of the law around gender is as weak as his grasp on reality.
One in a thousand women can have a penis
When first asked whether a woman can have a penis by muckraking journalists, Starmer would often flat-out refuse to answer. ‘I do find that too many people – in my view – retreat or hold a position which is intolerant of others’, he said to LBC’s Nick Ferrari in 2022.
By 2023, he had finally worked out a formulation that he thought could please all sides, telling The Sunday Times that, ‘of course’ 99.9 per cent of women ‘don’t have a penis’.
That may sound like a small proportion, but the implication of Starmer’s claim is that potentially one in every thousand British women might have a cock beneath her frock. That’s roughly 35,000 female penises. Which is surely 35,000 too many.
‘Tony’s right about that’
Starmer was clearly unmoved by the anguish of Rosie Duffield and unphased by the mounting evidence of the dangers of self-ID to women. What actually set him on the path towards (apparent) sanity was an intervention from Tony Blair. ‘Biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis’, declared the former Labour PM ahead of last year’s General Election.
It’s the kind of comment Starmer would once have dismissed as ‘intolerant’, ‘not right’ or perhaps even not ‘the law’. Yet when it emerged from the mouth of Labour’s most successful living leader, Starmer couldn’t help but gush. ‘Tony’s right about that’, Starmer told the Telegraph at the time. ‘He put it very well… I agree with him on that.’ Just like that, the trans spell over Starmer seemed to be broken, paving the way for him to pretend that he’s always respected women’s spaces and has a firm grasp of biology.
Now, as Starmer seeks to rewrite history and self-identity as sensible, we cannot let him forget those years when he took complete leave of his senses.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
