By backing both reforms to the Gender Recognition Act and single-sex spaces, the party is unable to communicate clearly to voters
For Ruth Serwotka, the lowest point came on 13 February 2020. She was making coffee when Lisa Nandy, then a candidate for the Labour leadership, was asked on the radio about Woman’s Place UK, the grassroots campaigning organisation that Serwotka had helped found three years earlier. “She refused to say that we are not a hate group. I left the Labour party then. Up to that point I’d been determined to stay but I wasn’t prepared to be savaged and maligned any longer.”
Woman’s Place UK advocates for women’s sex-based rights, including single-sex services, and is partly responsible for turning support for these rights into a social movement. Campaigners like Serwotka believe that since the oppression of women has historically been based on sex, women’s rights must be understood as sex-based too – and I agree with them. This view places feminists like us, also known as gender-critical, in conflict with trans rights activists and their allies, who believe that gender identity and not sex determines whether they are a man or a woman.
Susanna Rustin is a Guardian journalist
