Labour is in thrall to the trans Taliban

This week, Labour MP Rosie Duffield drew online stones from the trans Taliban when she dared to ‘like’ a tweet. The MP for Canterbury signalled her support for a post by Twitter user Kurtis Tripp, a gay man who suffered an attempt at conversion therapy as a teenager.

Tripp’s tweet criticised the growing use of the word ‘queer’ in LGBT circles: ‘And look at who is reclaiming it? Mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as “gay”. Stop co-opting our language. Stop colonising gay culture.’ Tripp is the wrong sort of gay, it seems. A gay who dares to object to trans orthodoxy. And Duffield, by association, is now marked as unclean.

Anyone who has dipped their toe into the piranha-filled waters of social media will understand that simply farting in the vicinity of transgender activists is enough to have you branded a transphobe and condemned to death. In response to the unguarded ‘like’, LGBT+ Labour called for Duffield to have the whip removed and to be suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party. LGBT+ Labour chair Alex Beverley said:

‘We have been concerned with the transphobic interactions on Rosie Duffield’s social-media profiles for over a year. During that time, we have tried to constructively engage with her and have repeatedly called on the leadership to take clear and decisive action.’

There have been calls for Duffield to ‘re-educate’ herself in line with the party’s stance on trans matters before. In August last year, Duffield was mobbed online after she liked a tweet by Piers Morgan in which he took issue with a CNN post that referred to ‘individuals with a cervix’. After she was criticised for liking the tweet, Duffield reacted by saying: ‘I’m a “transphobe” for knowing that only women have a cervix…?!’