A female Labour Party MP has revealed that she will not attend the party’s conference this week over threats from “woke” straight white male transgender activists because of her feminist position that “only women have a cervix” and support for female-only spaces.
Rosie Duffield, who was elected to Parliament in a Tory Canterbury stronghold in 2017, said that she will not attend Labour’s conference in Brighton over security fears from the radical wing of her own party including from the socialist LGBT+ Labour campaign group.
The Labour MP said that she believes the majority of the threats come from left-wing “straight white men,” telling The Sunday Times: “There are some women who get involved and want to be seen to be very woke… but mostly it is men and the same men that have trolled me ever since I got elected.
“LGBT+ Labour now seem to hate my guts and I feared they’d have a massive go at me at [the] conference.”
“So it looks like, feels like and smells like misogyny, and this is just the latest cause they have latched on to… The fact that I am blonde — they call me a bimbo. The fact that I don’t like antisemitism. There is always something, but it is always the same people who attack me,” Duffield added.
Duffield, the chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, said that for the first time in her life, she would not recommend women going into politics, saying: “I would have to really think about what I was asking them to do, and putting people into this position when they are going to be on the front line of some pretty shitty abuse.”
The Labour MP said that she took the decision to not attend the conference after discussing the threats made against her with the Kent police, the chief whip, and the Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
However, Duffield said that she did not really believe the radical transgender activists would follow through on their threats, but said that she did not want to become the “centre of attention” at the conference by attending with security guards.
The Labour MP initially drew the ire of the far-left wing of her party after liking a tweet from broadcaster Piers Morgan, in which he stated that only women could have cervixes. She has since angered the transgender wing for supporting women-only spaces, in light of her own experiences with domestic abuse from her former fiancé.
“Women have to feel safe in their own single-sex services and spaces like loos,” she said. “I have plenty of transgender friends who are completely OK with everything I say and we are able to have a completely civil dialogue about it.”
“Why are women so desperate to divorce themselves from everything they associate with being female?” she said. “Why are they so uncomfortable? Why is it such a terrible place to be? These are questions that need answering and need to be discussed sensibly. It certainly rings massive alarm bells for people like me, of my generation, who have been feminists their entire lives.”
In what has been described as an “unprecedented intervention”, the Speaker of the House of Commons waded into the debate to say that MPs should be able to exercise their duties and appear in public “without fear of harm”.
Speaking at a meeting of G7 Speakers over the weekend, Sir Lindsay Hoyle said: “Parliamentarians, who have been elected to speak up for their constituents, should be able to attend their own party conference without fear of harm.
“Too many people have been targeted for their opinion or the office they hold. In order to protect democracy, we need to ensure those participating can do so without threats of intimidation.”
He argued that social media companies should take a bigger role in policing threats made against politicians, saying: “The fact is, these people who want to say ‘I want to murder him’, ‘I want to target him’, somebody had claimed they were going to put a bomb under my car, these are the kinds of things that we shouldn’t tolerate, we shouldn’t accept.
“So we’ve got to stamp them out together and call it out. And that’s what’s so important.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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