Sorry, Wes Streeting. This isn't good enough.

Wes Sreeting signalled a major shift in the Labour Party’s attitude towards the gender issue by stating, somewhat admirably, that JK Rowling shouldn’t have pipe bomb threats delivered to her by Twitter and real threats turning up at her door, but he tipped his hand when he laid the blame for abuse on “both sides”.

“Both sides” is one of those myths—like JK Rowling’s ‘bigotry’—that simply will not die. Like “transwomen are women” it has been successfully inserted into the language by one side of the debate, that being the one doling out the abuse.

Every single person accused of transphobia has been vindicated, if not in the courts themselves, then in the court of public opinion. Rosie Kay, Harry Miller, Kate Scottow, Miranda Yardley…I could keep naming names but I don’t want to spend all day finding links. Most crucially, Posie Parker has finally been allowed to talk and the public sees she’s just saying normal, sensible, shit with which they all agree.

But until very recently, men like Streeting were doing everything in their power to silence women like Posie Parker.

In November 2017 a 19-year-old trans identified male, Liam ‘Lily’ Madigan, was elected as the women’s officer for the Labour Party branch in Rochester and Strood. His appointment came only days after he’d bullied long-time women’s rights campaigner and Labour Party member, Anne Ruzylo, out of her women’s officer role in the Bexhill and Battle constituency. Madigan’s ‘gender identity’ was still in its infancy and he was fresh out of the school he had sued the previous year for denying him access to female-only spaces.

His appointment contravened the Labour Party’s own rules requiring trans-identified males to be in receipt of a GRC in order to hold (steal) women’s roles. When women objected, they were told the rules had been changed. When women objected to this, they were labelled TERFs and transphobes.

Madigan then embarked on a witch hunt to eject the women trying to protect their sex-based rights from the Labour Party. He created a covert Facebook group called ‘Labour Against Transphobia’. Members of this group were asked to name women in the party they deemed to be 'transphobic' and supply evidence of their supposed crimes. The information was then fed to Labour Party officials with the aim of having the accused members expelled.

Madigan tried to deny he was involved in the group and its compiling of a shady dossier. However, screenshots taken from the Facebook group tell a different story.

The resulting hit-list of over 30 women included several prominent feminist names, Linda Bellos and Stephanie Davies Arai among them. Two of the women featured, Jennifer James (who was crowd-funding a legal challenge to Labour’s policy allowing trans-identified males on to women-only shortlists) and Venice Allan, were suspended from the party.

Can you guess who was a member of this clandestine group with the sole aim of silencing and expelling gender critical women?

That’s right; Wes Streeting. He tried to deny it…

But the evidence seems unequivocal.

And guess where Streeting came from before he migrated to the Labour Party? That’s right. Stonewall.

It’s not good enough for a key figure like Streeting to say that JK Rowling should not be threatened and bullied. He should apologise for his part in what she has suffered, in what many of us have suffered, before being allowed to move on and pretend it never happened.

There’s going to have to be some sort of truth and reconciliation process at the end of all this. I want people to explain to my face why my analysis of this issue brought on, to quote Allison Bailey, “vilification, abuse, boycott, character assassination and cancellation." Why the Rubberbandits tried to help cancel a children’s TV show made by my wife. Why men I thought were friends can chuckle at my difficulty making a living, and sometimes even help that process along. Why my own ex-brother-in-law shared a tweet by one of these guys. Why the Ted musical is in danger of not being made. Why did I deserve that? Where am I wrong? Where is JK Rowling wrong? Where are we wrong on women’s sports? On women in prison? On language being erased? Where are we wrong? Can anyone tell us why we deserve what we’ve been living through for the last four years?

If Wes Steeting wants to be taken seriously by whoever it was in the polling that made him take on that deathly pallor, a reverse ferret is just not good enough. He needs to apologise. Quite a few people need to apologise.