IN JULY THIS YEAR, KEIR STARMER UTTERED the words many a left-wing uterus-haver has been longing to hear. “A woman is an adult human female,” he told Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 Live, “so let’s clear that one up.”
Yes, let’s! Not that anything needed clearing up to begin with. It’s not that this truth had become unknowable, so much as unsayable.
In recent years, defining women in a way that everyone knows to be true has become an act of transgression (or, as Pink News reported it, “a transphobic dogwhistle”). Meanwhile, asking a politician to define “woman” is deemed a “gotcha”; that is, a question that shouldn’t be asked because it’s too challenging (if not linguistically then at least politically).
Hence we ought to be grateful for Starmer’s act of bravery. Indeed, like many a would-be Labour-supporting feminist, I’m relieved that the man who looks set to become our next PM seems to have abandoned making idiotic claims such as “99.9
