TLDRThe Sunday Times can't decide whether trans people suddenly justify a Labour shift to the hard right, or whether a Labour shift to the right justifies a crackdown on trans people, even though trans people long ago knew that the rightwards shift AND the crackdown on trans liberty are the same picture and were decided before the General Election. This Sunday Times article seems to have no function other than to construct a flimsy case for there being a political and electoral logic behind Establishment anti trans persecution, and a global political shift to the right, rather than the reality of it being the product of intensive lobbying.

A strange article appeared in the Sunday Times today, online at least - I’m not sure if it appeared in the print edition. It is by Geraldine Scott, “Senior Political Correspondent.” Article archived here

It presents as news, a story that will be something less than an unexpected bombshell to anyone who has been paying attention to the downward spiral of UK politics, away from pluralism into a hard right Lab/Con/Reform consensus on social and economic matters, that Starmer’s Labour Party is actually going to (gasp) abandon a manifesto pledge. In this case it should surprise no politically aware trans person or ally that Labour is going to do the expected and abandon even it’s own self imposed compromise on gender recognition reform which was sketchy and didn’t seem to provide an more than even the perfunctory substitute that Liz Truss proposed as a replacement for “self ID”. Only in 2017, the media and political consensus was that self identification of gender status was an obvious and uncontroversial next step, supported by a parliamentary inquiry, until redoubled efforts by powerful lobbyists who had decided to make an example of trans people after vested interests in the Establishment had felt their hitherto unassailable status dealt an almost extinction level blow by equal marriage.

In trans people they saw a last glimmer of hope in establishing a bridgehead to gain back all the ground they had lost in terms of a say in the human rights agenda and bodily autonomy, including the land of lost content that was Gillick Competence, and even abortion rights.

What is most interesting about the article is not the highly anticipated reversal that isn’t even to be regarded as a reversal any more after the strong anti-trans signalling from Starmer and Streeting (and even Tony Blair), from long before the general election, culminating in Labour MPs mostly abstaining from voting against the bizarre and extreme use of Section 35 for the first and only time to ban Scotland from passing the Gender Recognition Reform Act. Nor is it the usual colourful language that the print media now uses about trans people, such as anti trans lobbyists anonymised as “campaigners” or anti trans sloganeering such as “Sir Keir Starmer has strengthened his position on biological sex after previous struggles to define a woman.” What is most interesting is the multiplicity of reasons set forth, and the seeming retrofitting of a familiar regressive stance into the increasingly right wing vibe shift of Starmer’s Labour Party.

The article says –

Labour has mothballed plans to make it easier to legally change gender, The Times has learnt, in a step to counter Reform UK’s surge in the polls.

and –

However, multiple sources said that the reforms were not a priority for ministers. They expect the plans to quietly “go away”

The non-news comes from “multiple sources.” Of course the innuendo from this might be that there are splits in Labour’s ranks, or there would be if Starmer had not been eagerly signalling his alignment with religion and “common sense” against trans rights long before the election, but they all boil down to the same agenda (as reported by the right wing and anti trans Sunday Times Newspaper). Something Labour already didn’t want to do, almost certainly because of intensive lobbying, becomes an armature on which to attach rationalisations for a sudden intensification of Labour’s shift towards the hard right.

One insider pointed to a poll this week that put Reform above Labour for the first time, and said it would be “catnip” for Nigel Farage’s party if Labour was to push ahead on gender.

So far so familiar, Labour pursuing progressive policies might be opposed by the hard right. We can’t have that.

Another warned that going ahead would give more ammunition to Elon Musk in his attacks on the government, at a time when President Trump is acting to bolster single-sex spaces.

Elon Musk setting the agenda for UK politics seems a bit far fetched even though Westminster and the UK media’s right wing vibe shift almost certainly come from Republican Christian Nationalist America via certain “think tanks.”

A third source referenced the fronts on which the government is already defending its position, such as winter fuel payments, the economy and inheritance tax, and said: “Why would we open that particular can of worms for ourselves at this particular moment?”

Progressivism being a distraction from putative bread and butter issues that the neoliberal right never addresses anyway, is a familiar right wing trope.

It is understood that the reforms, which were included in Labour’s manifesto, have not been officially dropped because this would start arguments with parts of the party’s voter base. They was not included in the King’s Speech for this parliamentary session.

What is not explained is how a policy can simultaneously be hidden from the party’s voter base, but still be sufficiently apparent to somehow appeal to Reform voters.

What this article seems to boil down to is that a party not doing what it long ago decided not to do, demonstrates that an inexplicable shift to the right both generally and in terms of LGBTQ+ rights is somehow a coherent political strategy, in spite of polling data that shows that “Red Wall” voters are no different from the rest of the electorate in their attitude to trans rights.

So the Times looks on approvingly while the strong, decisive Sir Keir Starmer crushes the already drugged and bound remains of progressivism in Labour. We may safely write this off as another example of “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”