India Willoughby, the 'cis woman'

India Willoughby is a 56-year-old trans-identified male who calls himself a ‘cis woman’, and believes that trans people in the UK today face the same persecution as Jews did during the Holocaust. He’s now hoping to run as an MP for Labour at the next general election.

Willoughby was a relatively unknown reporter for ITV Border until 2010 before announcing, in 2015, that he, then aged 50, identified as a woman, which transformed his career, briefly earning him a presenting slot on ITV’s Loose Women. He went on to become a Channel 5 news presenter in 2017 and then appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018.

It was here that Willoughby gained international attention. During the show he told R&B singer Ginuwine that he was a woman and therefore the heterosexual singer should kiss him, which Ginuwine refused to do, leading to accusations that he was ‘transphobic’. In his brief time on the show he also accused the female contestants of misgendering him, patronising him and being aggressive, and shouted at actress Amanda Barrie (at the time an 80-year-old woman in a same-sex relationship): “I’m a real woman Amanda, I want you to know that. A real woman. I’m glad that’s sinking in. I’m going to say it one more time so it really penetrates: I am a real woman.”

Despite being media trained, desperate for work and often treated by the media as the ‘moderate’ trans activist because he believes that you can only call yourself transgender if you have surgery, Willoughby has made numerous comments that would destroy the career of a gender-critical woman if she had made them. For example, on a BBC discussion about self ID, he repeatedly referred to people with disabilities as ‘cripples’, to make a point that as a disabled person is no longer disabled if surgery removes the disability, the same principle can be applied to men who want to become women.

He also said this last year:

But his most common claim in recent months has been to draw a comparison between how trans people are treated in the UK to the Holocaust. No trans person has ever been murdered in UK history due to ‘transphobia’ while six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust).

This summer he made a video about it in which he said: “Trans people are the new Jews. Make no mistake, Britain is trying to eradicate trans people as much as possible. If Jewish people were being treated this way there would be an outcry.”

Recently Conservative MP Mark Jenkinson tweeted: "I’m told that some local group is counting my gender-critical tweets and trying to make out they’re homophobic and transphobic. If they want to contact me directly - as they haven’t once - I can arrange to send a copy of the brilliant [Helen Joyce's book, Trans]. I will continue to stand up for the hard-won rights of women and the LGB community. It’s not heterosexual men that suffer when we erase the notion of biological sex, but women and those that are same-sex attracted."

Willoughby replied that he would therefore stand against Jenkinson at the next general election - hopefully for Labour (even though he describes his views as “right of centre”).

It seems inconceivable that Labour would allow someone as toxic as Willoughby to stand as their MP, but this is a Labour Party that is now hopelessly captured by gender identity ideology. This week alone Labour peer Shami Chakrabati argued against an amendment in the House of Lords that male rapists should not be housed in women’s jails, even if they identify as women, using this logic:

"I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that, if he and I were trapped in a lift with a third person—this is just a hypothetical, not an invitation, I promise—and the third person was a cis woman, born a woman, still a woman, always a woman, but nonetheless a white supremacist with previous convictions as long as your arm for violence against non-white women, I would feel much more threatened by the presence of that offender than by the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. He is looking quizzical, but my point is that the Secretary of State has responsibilities to people in custody, in particular, and to people in vulnerable spaces that cannot be dealt with using the blunt instrument of an amendment like this.

"I suggest to the noble Lord that in the hypothetical lift I would be at far greater risk from the white supremacist with previous convictions. This is not a total hypothetical, because this has happened in male prisons where non-white offenders have been murdered by fellow cis males—that being the term for people born and always a man—because of a lack of diligence about the offending and attitudinal profile of a person."

Maybe Labour is the perfect place for Willoughby after all.