The left-wing Labour Party has “abandoned” women to appease its increasingly woke base on the issue of transgenderism, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said.
Rowling, previously a darling of the liberal left for her success as an author and leading feminist voice, suggested that even though she would like to see the Tories lose at the July 4th general election, she cannot support a Labour Party that goes against women’s rights.
Rowling wrote in The Times: “I’ve been a Labour voter, a member (no longer), donor (not recently) and campaigner (ditto) all my adult life. I want to see an end to this long stretch of chaotic and often calamitous Tory rule. I want to want to vote Labour.”
However, she said that “as long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them,” she said.
“The women who wouldn’t wheesht [be quiet] didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.”
The Harry Potter author cited recent comments from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer during an appearance this week on BBC’s Question Time, in which an audience member pressed the frontrunner to become the next prime minister whether or not he still believed that Labour MP Rosie Duffield was wrong to say that only women can have services, which Starmer previously described as a “toxic” position to state.
Duffield, like Rowling, has largely been ostracised since and has claimed to need security guards to protect her from potential violence from far-left transgenderism advocates.
In response o the audience question on Thursday, he said: “I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas on the biology, that doesn’t help on the gender. There are some people who don’t identify with the gender that they’re born into um and they go through a lot of anxiety and distress and my view in life is to is to respect and give dignity to everyone.”
The Labour leader had previously come under criticism for being unable to say whether women could have penises or not, though he later admitted that women are “adult females“.
Responding to the Labour leader’s latest stance on the issue, Rowling said: “The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Tony Blair.”
“For left-leaning women like us this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen and being free to present and identify however they wish.
“This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth.”
Starmer attempted to defend himself from the critiques from Rowling, saying on Saturday: “I’m really proud of the long history of the Labour Party in making real progress on women’s rights, passing landmark legislation that has changed millions of lives.
“I’m also determined that one of the changes that we will bring about if we win the election is a reset of politics, to make sure that as we make progress, we do it in a context that brings people together, and all dialogue, all debate, is always done with respect for the views of everybody involved in those progress and in that discussion.”
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