Labour MP Rosie Duffield explains ‘gender critical’ views in anti-trans tirade
Rosie Duffield took to Twitter to deliver an anti-trans rant. (Facebook/Rosie Duffield)
Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, has published a string of anti-trans tweets.
In a 10-tweet Twitter thread on 10 September, Duffield called trans women “male-bodied biological men” and came out as having “gender critical” beliefs and dismissed the UK’s population of hundreds of thousands of trans men as “a very small number of people”.
Duffield’s rant was apparently sparked by a Kent Online article about a gay Tory councillor, Ben Fitter-Harding, speaking about how proud he is to be the first openly gay leader of Canterbury City Council, and accusing Duffield of ” inflict[ing] such pain” on the trans community.
“Whilst I’ve always fully supported the rights of all trans people to live freely as they choose, I do not accept self-ID as a passport for male-bodied biological men to enter protected spaces for biological women,” Duffield said.
She went on to state her – incorrect – belief that the majority of people share her view that trans women should be barred from “[domestic violence] refuges, women’s prisons, single-sex wards and school toilets”.
Ths is my local newspaper. They feature this Conservative Cllr every week. His political interests seem mostly to involve concreting over our green spaces and he became leader recently after staging a coup against a fellow local Tory cllr…(long 🧵) https://t.co/ueDC5HFxlY
— Rosie Duffield (@RosieDuffield1) September 10, 2021
“Some angry strangers, none of whom have ever met me, have decided what I believe and that it is ‘transphobic’, which seems to others piling on to be the worst of all possible crimes,” Duffield tweeted.
She continued: “My sins? To agree that male-bodied people should not be included in list of murdered women; to have ‘liked’ tweets such as Piers Morgan’s ‘You mean women?’ when he read a health advice post about ‘people with a cervix’.
“While there may be a very small number of people who now identify as men and still have female organs, the vast majority of women should not have to rename our bodies or ourselves accordingly.”
It is understood that Labour’s investigation into Rosie Duffield following complaints of transphobia, which PinkNews has previously covered, is ongoing. Duffield denies she is transphobic and claims criticism of her views is “misogyny”.
“The mostly male aggression and verbal abuse about this has resulted in changes to my personal safety and security arrangements,” she wrote.
So-called gender critical activists were this week compared to fascists by feminist thinker Judith Butler, in a now-deleted section of a Guardian article about gender.
Earlier this year, the Institute of Race Relations warned that “gender critical” activists are “peddling the far-right agenda“.
The views of some British “gender critical” activists, like sex being immutable and non-binary people not existing, is shared by many high-profile right-wing public figures globally, including Hungary’s fascist dictator Viktor Orban and former US president Donald Trump.
Two women quit Duffield’s team over ‘overtly transphobic’ views
Two cisgender women, one a lesbian and the other an LGBT+ ally, quit Rosie Duffield’s office last year citing the MP’s “overtly transphobic”” views.
After the second woman resigned, Rosie Duffield outed her on Twitter – leading to the trade union for MP’s staff condemning Duffield for “abusing her position” and calling for the Labour Party to immediately launch a formal investigation.
The GMB Members’ Staff union said Duffield’s actions had left the staffer “vulnerable to online abuse and fearful for her safety”.
In July 2021, LGBT+ Labour – which is affiliated with the party – called for Duffield to have the whip withdrawn and to be suspended from Labour, citing a “pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour“.
In her thread, Duffield said she has “actively fought for gay rights (and all human rights) all of my life”.
“I will continue to support LGBT rights as I have done all of my life, whether stranger men say so or not,” she added.
