Patrick Christys: If a politician can’t define what a woman is, then how on earth can they run a country?

If a politician can’t define what a woman is, then how on earth can they run a country?

It used to be questions about how much a loaf of bread costs or the price of a pint of milk that would stump our MPs, but now it’s something even more basic than that – what is a woman?

The answer, of course, is adult human female. It is as simple as that.

And yet here we are – Keir Starmer came out and said trans women are women. It’s interesting he’s told us his views on that when trying to get a policy out of him is like extracting blood from a stone. Who is Sir Keir to tell women what a woman is?

And then we’ve had Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper refusing three times to offer a definition of a woman, she said she wasn’t going down that rabbit hole…

Then Annaleise Dodds, Labour’s equalities spokesperson, said the definition of woman depended on ‘context’.

The only context needed is whether or not they’ve been born with a vagina.

If these people are wriggling in their seats when asked a straightforward question about gender, then how on earth do you expect them to react to the really big issues – if they can’t make their mind up about what a woman is, how can we trust them to make their minds up about whether to go to war, or about fracking, or about the cost of living crisis?

Sadiq Khan has just come out and said he wants children as young as four to be educated about misogyny to combat violence against women.

That in itself is a good thing, of course, but hang on a minute, I imagine he might struggle with that idea, given that we don’t seem to be able to define what a woman actually is.

You can see it now, can’t you, Janice from the Art Department standing in front of a room full of four-year-olds – Now, what do we mean by women, children?

Little Timothy puts his hand up – adult human female – Timmy spends a week in detention because he’s now a transphobic terf.

JK Rowling has been one of the more outspoken defenders of women’s rights on this issue. She’s been very clear that she thinks everybody should be allowed to live their lives but if the transgender agenda starts impacting upon women’s safety then that’s where she draws the line.

And look at how much she’s copped it. Threats online, she’s had her address put out in the public domain, people turning up there, she was even pseudo-cancelled by the Harry Potter franchise, for goodness sake.

Emma Watson took a sly dig at Rowling at the BAFTAs, the irony being that nobody would have heard of Emma Watson if it wasn’t for the magic of Rowling’s creative brilliance and literary genius.

From where I’m sitting, there is misogyny taking place. We have men telling women what a woman is and then demonising women who speak out against them. And then there’s arguably the even greater problem of internalised misogyny, which I’m finding it very difficult to get my head around.

In many cases it seems to be women who are actually trying to cancel other women who don’t want to suspend biological fact.

To try to cancel other women who want to stand up for female rights – the right to their own gender identity, the right to have female only prisons, the right to not have men in their changing rooms, the right to not have a fully grown man competing against them in a sporting event… I can’t get my head around that.

The irony here is that, when you look at the BAFTAs as an example, many of the women there were showing huge solidarity with the METOO movement, they class themselves as feminists…and yet it appears they simultaneously support the dilution or erasure of what it means to be a woman.

I know it might seem a bit on the nose that me, a man, is getting on his soapbox about female identity. But one day I might have a daughter, and I want that little girl to grow up in a world where she knows, without any doubt, what her identity is. I want her to have a safe space. I want her to know that being a woman is about more than just a feeling.