Hear them roar
New Zealand Listener|September 2-8 2023
For the past couple of years one of the most excruciating sights in British politics has been when a Labour Party figure is asked to define what a woman is. In their desperate efforts to say nothing while speaking words, they have frequently taken the English language into whole new territories of evasion and obfuscation.
Andrew Anthony 
Hear them roar

Last year, for example, shadow minister for women and equalities Anneliese Dodds told a reporter on International Women's Day that there were "different definitions legally around what a woman actually is", and said the answer depended on "the context". Finally, after much prodding, she took refuge under the party's definition: "A woman is a woman." 

There were many other such adventures in tautology and verbal contortionism. Then suddenly, a few weeks back, Labour leader Keir Starmer announced that a "woman is an adult female", precisely the phrase that had previously been deemed career-endingly transphobic. Anyway, he said it, society did not collapse and the world continued to turn.

The irony is that as a debate has raged around the political acceptability or otherwise of biological reality, women themselves have continued to show that, whatever their definition, they can't be easily categorised.

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