Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of lacking “moral courage” on transgender issues during heated exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Last week, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman should be based on biological sex under equalities law, meaning, for instance, that transgender women, who are biologically male but identify as women, can be excluded from women-only spaces.
Sir Keir said the court’s ruling provided “clarity” and that it was now “time to lower the temperature” on the debate.
Badenoch said the prime minister didn’t “have the balls” to say where he stood and likened him to a “weather vane”.
“This is a choice between a Conservative Party that stood up for common sense and a Labour Party that bent the knee to every passing fad,” she said.
“This is a question about moral courage, about doing the right thing even when it is difficult.”
On Tuesday, Sir Keir’s spokesman said the prime minister did not believe transgender women were women.
That contrasted with comments he made in 2022, when he told the Times “a woman is a female adult, and in addition to that transwomen are women, and that is not just my view – that is actually the law”.
In the first Prime Minister’s Questions since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Badenoch used all six of her questions to press the prime minister on the issue.
She asked if he would apologise to Rosie Duffield, the MP who left Labour last year and whom Badenoch said had been “hounded out” of the party.
Sir Keir did not answer directly, instead saying his approach would be based on treating “everyone with dignity and respect”.
“When we lose sight of that approach and make this a political football, as happened in the past, then we end up with the spectacle of a decent man – and he was a decent man – the previous prime minister [Rishi Sunak], diminishing himself at this despatch box by making trans jokes whilst the mother of a murdered trans teenager watched from the public gallery just up there,” he said.
“That will never be my approach.”
Last year, Sir Keir and Sunak rowed over a transgender comment the latter made on the day Esther Ghey – the mother of murdered transgender teenage Brianna – was visiting Parliament.
During PMQs, Sir Keir sought to attack Badenoch’s record, accusing her of doing “nothing” when she was women and equalities minister.
Badenoch defended her record, telling MPs she had helped commission the Cass review into gender identity services for young people, and blocked the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland.
In contrast, she said Labour MPs were questioning the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Sir Keir replied that she should be more worried about her own MPs, specifically the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick who, he said, was plotting to replace her as party leader and trying to form a coalition with Reform UK.
Following the question session in the Commons, a Downing Street spokesperson was asked if the PM would be apologising to Duffield.
The spokesperson said he did not want to “indvidualise this” but added: “It’s clearly the case that there are individuals – women who have helped to bring about this legal clarity – that have not been treated in the right way. That is obviously wrong.”
He added that the prime minister would “completely condemn” death threats received by the For Women Scotland who brought the Supreme Court legal case, adding they were “completely unacceptable”.
