In October 2019, the Labour MP Rosie Duffield went viral. Duffield had been in Westminster for only two years, although her campaign to win the seat of Canterbury had impressed Blairites with its broad coalition of both union and cross-party support. It took a charged debate in the Commons and a high-profile speech for Duffield to find herself trending on social media for the first time.

Duffield’s breakthrough speech wasn’t about transgender people. It wasn’t about access to toilets, and it wasn’t about cervixes. It was about domestic abuse. It was about her experience of domestic abuse, by a partner she described as coercive and controlling, whom she had eventually been able to leave with the support of friends. At one point, she described abuse erupting on a weekend mini-break: “In a strange city his face changes in a way you are starting to know and dread. In a way that tells you, you need to stay calm, silent and very careful.”

In the years since, Rosie Duffield has found herself trending much more frequently, often as a bête noir of transgender activists. Many now may know her name only as a by-word for an intemperate “debate” on sex and gender.

When Labour leader Keir Starmer faced voters on BBC Question Time last week, he was tripped up not, as some male pundits predicted, by a question about his equivocations on Jeremy Corbyn, but by one about his equivocations on Duffield – which provoked an explosive intervention by JK Rowling. Debating Rishi Sunak this Wednesday, Starmer refused to even respond to a direct question about Duffield from chair Mishal Husain.

To understand the depth of Rowling’s anger, and of women who share her perspective, we need to go back to that first major parliamentary speech. It should have been the defining moment of Rosie Duffield’s career.

Colleagues........

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