When I was invited to appear on Question Time ahead of the Brexit referendum, says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, the producer told me there would be another woman on the panel alongside me. But when I arrived, I was “dumbfounded” to find that the other “woman” was genderfluid comedian Eddie Izzard. How could Izzard – lacking all “the key milestones and experiences of a woman’s life”, not to mention female genitalia – qualify to take one of two female panel slots?
One day, this question could “get me arrested”. Keir Starmer wants to bring in tough laws making “misgendering” someone – refusing to call “a bloke in a dress ‘she’” – an aggravated crime. Rather than ceding to this “cult of gender identity”, the Labour leader should take heed of sensible colleagues like Rosie Duffield, MP for Canterbury. “I won’t say that a man is a woman,” she said this week. “Eddie Izzard is not a woman.” Hear, hear. We must “push back against the tyrannical tide”, and re-establish space for biologically sexed females – space we “struggled and died” to secure.