Opinion: For the past couple of years one of the most excruciating sights in British politics has been when a Labour Party figure is asked to define what a woman is. In their desperate efforts to say nothing while speaking words, they have frequently taken the English language into whole new territories of evasion and obfuscation.
Last year, for example, shadow minister for women and equalities Anneliese Dodds told a reporter on International Women’s Day that there were “different definitions legally around what a woman actually is”, and said the answer depended on “the context”. Finally, after much prodding, she took refuge under the party’s definition: “A woman is a woman.”
There were many other such adventures in tautology and verbal contortionism. Then suddenly, a few weeks back, Labour leader Keir Starmer announced that a “woman is an adult female”, precisely the phrase that had previously been deemed career-endingly transphobic. Anyway, he said it, society did not collapse and the world continued to turn.
The irony is that as a debate has raged around the political acceptability or otherwise of biological reality, women themselves have continued to show that, whatever their definition, they can’t be easily categorised.
Some observers like to point out that if you’d told people even 10 years ago that it would soon come to be that you could put your livelihood in jeopardy for insisting that only women had cervixes, no one would have believed you.
If that’s true, then it’s also true that if you’d said at the same time that 15 million English people, male and female, would sit down on a Sunday morning to watch a football game played between women, then you’d have probably been laughed at.
But that’s exactly what took place when England played Spain in the final of the Fifa Women’s World Cup in Sydney. I happened to be at a friend’s birthday party in the countryside, where 12 of us were on the edges of our seats, shouting at the TV, imploring the Englishwomen on as they tried in vain to equalise against a superior Spanish side.
Alessia Russo, Millie Bright, Lauren Hemp – these were names that meant nothing to me a couple of years ago, and yet now they are national heroines, having already won the European Championship last year.
It’s hard to overstate what a fundamental social transformation the Lionesses represent. Football has always been a male preserve in Britain – played by men, watched by men, administered by men, managed by men and discussed on TV by men. That has slowly changed in recent years as the men’s game has attempted to become more family-friendly and female-welcoming.
But the success of the Lionesses has also coincided with women appearing in the men’s game – as referees (unthinkable 20 years ago) and as TV pundits (unthinkable two years ago). The joke was always that if you wanted to confuse a woman, ask her to explain the offside rule.
That joke has rebounded as the women have shown the men how to win an international tournament – something Englishmen have not achieved since 1966.
Why do so many of the English players seem to have blonde hair? Why do all of them wear it in a long top-knot ponytail? And what accounts for the lack of ethnic diversity (the men’s game in England is overrepresented by players of Afro-Caribbean heritage)?
None of the women present on the weekend could answer those questions and some of them weren’t quite as interested as the men in the game’s outcome. But these are early days. The key thing is that another bastion of male domination has fallen and England is a better place for it.
