Rosie Duffield is a transphobic bigot.
Yesterday, in a piece for The Times, Labour MP Rosie Duffield claimed that she felt it was no longer safe for her to attend Pride. This marks the first time I’ve ever agreed with her. She’s right; she probably isn’t safe to be at Pride. But not because she’ll be in any danger. Rather, she’ll have to look into the eyes of the people she has spent years insulting, accusing of horrific things, and lying about. When your actions tend to involve being a bigoted person, facing the consequences of them can often feel unsafe. Oh well.
Anyway, today she launched her election campaign, and inevitably this came alongside yet more claims from the Canterbury hopeful that, despite a long history of hateful transphobia, she isn’t transphobic. So, let’s take a moment to outline why that’s a lie. She is a massive transphobe, she absolutely shouldn’t be attending Pride anyway, and she’s also just a horrible human being.
In 2020, after liking a tweet by Piers Morgan complaining about inclusive language, Duffield was called out by a Twitter user who called her a transphobe. Following this, Duffield responded, writing: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing only women have a cervix…?!” because, presumably, Rosie Duffield doesn’t think trans men exist.
Unsurprisingly, this led to yet more backlash against the MP, leading to Duffield expanding on her initial response with a ten-tweet thread in which she proceeded to call trans women “male-bodied biological men” and wrote that they should be barred from “refuges, women’s prisons, single-sex wards and school toilets.” She also referred to herself as having gender-critical views, which is an absolutely insane way to try and prove to people that you’re not transphobic.
These comments led to Duffield aligning herself with other more openly transphobic MPs and public figures, which in turn led to two cis LGBTQ+ staffers at her constituency office quitting. In their resignation letter, one of these former staff members wrote that Duffield’s comments were “troubling” and “offensive to the trans community.” They went on to say, “Furthermore, your lack of retraction of these words indicated that it was indeed your stance, which I believe to be transphobic […] This put me, an LGBT+ member of your team and someone who has campaigned for LGBT+ rights for most of my life, in a highly compromised position.”
Rather than take this on board, Duffield doubled down. In 2022, she attended a lunch with J.K. Rowling and other anti-trans figures, including members of the lobby group ‘Get the L Out’, and Scottish MP Joanna Cherry, who herself has been openly transphobic. This lunch took place at the same time thousands of trans people and their allies gathered outside Downing Street to demand that Boris Johnson include trans people in a UK conversion therapy ban.
Following that, in October of the same year, Duffield spoke at a conference for LGB Alliance — the anti-trans hate group — and made a joke about Eddie Izzard, saying she would rather be arrested than refer to her as a woman. Apparently, in Duffield’s words, it isn’t transphobic to constantly refuse to acknowledge that trans people are even trans. It does make you wonder just what she would consider to be transphobic, doesn’t it?
In 2023, Duffield liked a tweet from the transphobic abuser and former comedy writer Graham Linehan that appeared to include Holocaust revisionism, denying that trans people and gay people were targets of the Nazis. She also appeared on Linehan’s podcast and claimed, falsely, that trans children were being allowed to “cut your body parts off and render them completely infertile.”
Duffield has also formed an alliance with Miriam Cates, the Conservative MP who has previously demanded a full ban on students’ gender identity being recognized in school and claimed during a debate on the government’s decision to prevent the Scottish government from passing a law making it easier for people in Scotland to self-identify that she had recently been in a public bathroom when a “man dressed as a woman walked into the toilets… he stood behind me and stared at me into the mirror, looking at me in my eyes.” Together, Duffield and Cates seek to ban trans women from refuges and rape crisis centres, as well as sports and public bathrooms. They claim, “this is not about being anti-trans, it’s about making sure one person’s interests do not override another’s.”
During a debate on the Equality Act, upon hearing from SNP MP Kirsty Blackman that one of her trans constituents had felt suicidal as a result of the rhetoric pushed forward by the likes of Duffield, Joanna Cherry, and the Alba Party’s Neale Hanvey, Duffield, Cherry, and Hanvey were all seen appearing to shrug this off in an uncaring and disbelieving way. Apparently, suicidal ideation isn’t something worth considering with sympathy when it’s a trans person who feels it, eh?
Duffield also outright lied in the House of Commons during a debate on the Scottish Gender Recognition Bill, claiming that the reforms to Scotland’s gender laws would “allow anyone at all to legally self-identify as either sex” and enter women’s changing rooms, domestic violence refuges, and other spaces. This is, of course, categorically not true, and she was heckled for talking “absolute rubbish” by other MPs within the House. That didn’t stop her from doing it and continuing to do it, mind.
Even Duffield’s own constituents have had issues with her brazen transphobic bigotry. After seeing an ITV News segment on the cost of living crisis, Duffield decided the real issue was the inclusion of a trans woman, and wrote on her Twitter, “I am sure this is a lovely, intelligent and decent human being. This was an important piece. This is not however a struggling ‘mother’.” Of course, this is very obviously transphobic, but what’s more important here is that Duffield’s comments led to the woman in question being subjected to abuse and even being falsely reported to the NSPCC for child abuse. This led to Duffield’s constituents calling her out, writing in the local paper, “…as older feminists active in women’s campaigns including women’s refuges as far back as the 70s, we want to make it clear that we do not share these views, we are trans allies…”
And it is worth pointing out here that Labour thinks this behaviour is acceptable. Not only has the Party repeatedly refused to investigate the MP for her transphobia, but former Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting even claimed that his turn toward gender-critical views came when he “saw the way my colleague Rosie Duffield was being treated.” While Keir Starmer said in an interview on LBC that he believed Duffield was an “important voice” within the Party. But Rosie Duffield is a hateful bigot who makes false claims about gender-affirming surgery, gleefully insults trans people as a “joke,” ignores historical facts about the Holocaust, and constantly paints trans women as predators, and I don’t think anyone should be standing up for that.
