Can Andy Burnham define ‘a woman’? The correct answer is ‘an adult human female’, though I would also accept ‘someone with no chance of being elected leader of the Labour party’. Burnham’s position on gender is under scrutiny after the resurfacing of an exchange from 2022 in which he was asked about men who self-identify as women using female toilets.
Ordinarily, I dislike this kind of journalism. The formulation ‘after past comments resurfaced’ is usually a dead giveaway that a news story isn’t news. The journalist who wrote it, or the editor who commissioned it, wants it to be news, often because they have an axe to grind. I make an exception in this case because Burnham’s answer undercuts his fatuous branding as a salt-of-the-earth, plain-speaking northerner.
Burnham began:
Clearly there is a group of people who do feel that toilets should be a safe space only for women and there should not be anyone biologically a male allowed in that space.
Note how he describes the mainstream view – men should use the men’s, women should use the women’s – like David Attenborough narrating a far-flung tribe’s elaborate ritual to appease the sun god. Of course, for a fully embedded member of the political elite like Burnham, public opinion on this subject is utterly alien, which is why he went on to say: ‘I don’t think that’s a majority view. I think it’s a minority view and quite a small minority view, actually.’ Behold, your tribune of the Mancunian working classes. They like three things up north: whippets, gravy and gender-neutral bathrooms.
Burnham deserves half a point of credit here. He did go on to say that, of those who hold this supposedly minority view: ‘Possibly they might be women who have experienced male violence at some point in their life.’ However, he then added:
The idea that people are falsely portraying their gender in a different way just because they want to abuse a women’s space or encroach on women’s safety… maybe it happens but you are talking a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people.
That’s a sentence you have to back up from to take in. Is he really that naive? Why does he think women’s toilets exist in the first place? It’s not just old-timey modesty and prudishness. In many ways, this is the most frustrating aspect of these comments, because it assumes that women who don’t want to share intimate spaces with men are irrational bigots hiding behind spurious safety concerns.
Go back ten years or so, when the conversation actually was about discreetly accommodating a tiny number of gender dysphoria sufferers, and a majority of women would have agreed to turn a blind eye. Far from a moral panic, it has taken years of feminist activism and awareness-raising to shift public opinion among women.
After the usual rhetorical shibboleths (‘this really polarised and terribly hateful debate’), Burnham concluded with a pledge of ideological loyalty: ‘I am going to make it really plain: I support trans rights and I want that to be known.’ Only too happy to oblige, Andy. Incidentally, the best way to support trans-identifying men and women is to ensure their rights are upheld, shield them from discrimination and violence, and increase support for people suffering from dysphoria. You don’t support them by reiterating the talking points of radical trans activists, either because you sincerely agree with them or because you figure this necessary for advancement within the Labour party.
The gender question isn’t going away, as the fresh guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission confirms, and if Burnham hopes to become leader of the Labour party he will have to address it. Whether he doubles down or U-turns or comes up with a fudge isn’t as important as what Burnham’s instinctive siding with elite progressivism in 2022 says about his supposed proletarian authenticity. It’s not so much that be believes the people’s flag is blue and pink, it’s that he repeats the nostrums of the establishment while posing as a political outsider. Andy Burnham self-identifies as a man of the people.
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