A general election is likely within the next 18 months, and people are panicking about how they are going to pay their bills and mortgages. Yet both major political parties seem fixated instead on the alleged clash between transgender rights and the rights of women. Labour spent the weekend behind closed doors at its national policy forum, and within a day the shadow equalities minister, Anneliese Dodds, wrote a piece laying out the party’s conclusions on the “reform” of transgender rights.
As Dodds pointed out, the Tories are cynically using this debate as a front in the culture war – a handy distraction from the legacies of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and their mismanagement of the economy, and one they hope will play well to their key demographics. But Labour is using it for its own ends, too, as yet another area in which the leadership wishes to ride the horse in two directions at once.
