David Tennant’s attack on Kemi exposes the Left’s sinister hypocrisy

In slamming Badenoch, the actor couldn’t conceive legions of women have a legitimate reason for fearing the erosion of women’s rights

Source - Daily Telegraph - 26/06/24

By the time the 2010 general election came around, David Tennant had already come and gone as the lead actor in Doctor Who and was carving out another starring role in Labour MPs’ election literature.

Tenant had outed himself as a Labour supporter and, faced with defeat at a national level, Labour candidates were keen to make the most of his public endorsement. 

But this week his association with Keir Starmer’s party became suddenly a touch more problematic. In an acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards, Tennant launched a personal attack on women and equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, publicly wishing that he lived in a world in which “Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more.” Perhaps recognising that wishing the government’s only black female minister didn’t exist was not a great look, he followed up with a hasty “I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.”

But was telling a woman who has been defending female spaces and rights to “shut up” a better look?

The context of this unseemly brawl is that Tennant is a high-profile trans “ally”, and Badenoch has been leading the government’s (somewhat belated) efforts to strengthen the Equality Act to safeguard women’s same-sex spaces and sports against intrusion by “trans women” (biological males). The likely frontrunner in the Conservative leadership election that is almost certain to follow next week’s rout of her party has become, therefore, a hate figure for the trans movement and its supporters.

Tennant is a typical representative of the kind of privileged metropolitan Leftist who preach virtue, tolerance and kindness – his awards ceremony speech contained the line “everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they’re not hurting anyone else” – while displaying none of those values towards anyone who dares to challenge their opinions.

Telling any woman, let alone a government minister, let alone a black woman, to “shut up” because she holds a different opinion would normally be considered the worst kind of misogynist bigotry by exactly the same kind of people who applauded Tennant’s speech. But in parts of the Left, tolerance and kindness have their limits, and they extend only to those who share the erroneous belief that gender-critical women are bigots and transphobes (a word so frequently and inaccurately used that it has become genuinely meaningless as an insult).

Tennant seems so committed to the trans cause that he can’t even consider the alternative view that perhaps – just perhaps – legions of women, including former Labour supporter J.K. Rowling and Labour MP Rosie Duffield, have a legitimate reason for fearing the erosion of women’s rights. The Left-wing litany is clear and simple: rights are not a pie or a zero-sum game, and the granting of rights to one group doesn’t mean that another group loses rights. That’s what they tell themselves, even though it is demonstrably false.

How do you preserve women’s rights to change or use toilet facilities away from the male gaze when you are angrily and aggressively defending the rights of men to use those same facilities, provided they wear a dress while doing so?

Does Tennant look at the four NHS nurses who are taking legal action against their employer at Darlington Memorial Hospital in defence of their right to use changing facilities free from male-bodied colleagues and judge them to be bigots and transphobes? Perhaps he would prefer them to “shut up” too and strip off in the presence of a man rather than risk making him feel bad?

And where are the Labour women who would scream in outrage if any man on the Right told one of them to shut up just because he disagreed with her? Isn’t Labour supposed to be the party of respectful debate on this issue? Or does that only apply when shouty women are banging on about their rights again?

Badenoch hardly needs me, a man, to defend her. She replied to Tennant on Twitter: “I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.”

Ooft, as the kids say. 

One last observation: isn’t it odd that in a week in which Rowling has been by far the most high-profile advocate of women’s rights and the staunchest media critic of Starmer and the Labour Party, Tennant chose not to target her? What, I wonder, made him decide not to attack one of the world’s most powerful women in broadcasting and media and instead have a go at a black woman politician? Strange times indeed.

Ironically, Rowling has been busy promoting the publication of an anthology of essays by women involved in the fight to defend women’s rights, to which she has contributed. The title is “The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht”. That Scottish phrase means “to shut up”. It’s one David Tennant will understand.