OPINION – JO BARTOSCH: Like so many Labour politicians, Burnham’s a coward. Confronted with absurd gender ideology, he nodded alongside and smeared critics.
Jo Bartosch, left, says Andy Burnham doesn’t know what a lady is! (Picture: Categorical / Getty)
Can a lady have a penis? That’s the ridiculous query Andy Burnham should get used to answering if he’s critical about turning into Prime Minister. But the supposedly no-nonsense northern politician has spent years wriggling round it. Footage from 2022 which has simply come to gentle reveals Burnham dismissing girls who wished female-only bogs and altering rooms as a “fairly small minority”. “I wish to say this loud and clear,” he declared. “Don’t begin tradition wars in Better Manchester as a result of we’re not desirous about it.”
He went additional nonetheless: “I do not wish to see folks standing up for trans rights and folks supposedly standing up for girls’s rights arguing on the streets of Manchester.” Supposedly! In a single phrase, Burnham revealed precisely what he thinks of campaigners unwilling to fake {that a} man can turn out to be a lady.
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However when he involves knock on doorways in Makerfield, forward of his extensively anticipated problem to Keir Starmer, Burnham could also be stunned to find that the majority voters don’t share his views. Polling carried out after final 12 months’s Supreme Courtroom ruling, which confirmed that intercourse in regulation means organic intercourse, discovered {that a} majority of the general public supported excluding trans-identified males from girls’s bogs, prisons and sports activities.
Throughout his tenure as mayor, Burnham has put public cash the place his mouth is. In 2025, it emerged that his Better Manchester Mixed Authority had spent £179,827 on variety, fairness and inclusion initiatives, whereas £112,000 went to the LGBT Basis to ship “non-binary inclusion” coaching programmes.
And there are actual victims when coverage is formed round gender ideology relatively than organic actuality. Earlier this week got here the gut-churning case of a severely mentally in poor health girl reportedly raped after being positioned on a psychiatric ward with males. Hospital employees could not have recognised her vulnerability as a lady. However the males on the ward did.
Burnham is worse than mistaken; he’s a coward. Confronted with an clearly absurd ideology, he did what too many Labour politicians did: nodded alongside, smeared critics as hateful and hoped the general public would keep quiet.
However the wannabe PM ought to ask himself this: almost a century after equal suffrage was gained, why ought to any self-respecting girl vote for a person who doesn’t respect her rights?
- Jo Bartosch is an creator, journalist and ladies’s rights campaigner. Her newest guide is Pornocracy
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