A Labour MP is under investigation by party officials because she liked a tweet saying that trans people were “mostly heterosexuals cosplaying”.
Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury, provoked fury from LGBT Labour activists after she endorsed a post by a gay man who complained that trans people had appropriated the use of the word “queer”.
Duffield, 50, liked a tweet by Kurtis Tripp, an American rapper, accusing trans people of “colonising gay culture” and saying they were “mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as gay”.
Cosplay is an abbreviation of costume play and is a practice whereby individuals dress up as their favourite cartoon characters.
LGBT+ Labour, an affiliated group, put pressure on Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, to remove the whip from Duffield.
Alex Beverley, the chairwoman of LGBT+ Labour, said that the party needed to show it did “not tolerate transphobia”.
“This recent endorsement of extremely homophobic and transphobic comments by Rosie Duffield is yet another example in a consistent pattern of behaviour,” Beverley told the LabourList website.
“The party must demonstrate that it stands with the LGBT+ community and that it will not tolerate transphobia or homophobia from our membership or elected officials.” It is now understood that party officials are looking into the case.
A Labour party spokeswoman said: “The Labour Party takes all complaints of homophobia or transphobia extremely seriously, which are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures.” Duffield was a member of Starmer’s front bench until earlier this year when she stood down for breaking lockdown rules.
In an interview with The Times last year, Duffield said that she had been left “completely terrified” by the levels of online abuse she received from trans activists after she liked a tweet suggesting that “individuals with a cervix” should be called “women”.
“It does feel like Gilead [the setting of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale], where women aren’t allowed to ask questions or proffer alternative ideas,” she said last year. “The shutting down of ideas is particularly dystopian.” Duffield was also criticised by campaigners for sharing an article in The Spectator that referred to the “transgender thought police”.
Duffield has said in the past that her own experiences of domestic abuse have made her particularly concerned about maintaining single-sex spaces for women.
“From a woman’s point of view what we are really terrified of is the erasure of women’s safe spaces, access to a female GP if you want for intimate physical examinations . . . changing rooms . . . We seem to have galloped to the point where women’s spaces are being taken away and that’s deeply terrifying,” she told The Times last year.
Duffield was approached for comment.
