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Can a woman have a penis? That is the ridiculous question Andy Burnham will have to get used to answering if he's serious about becoming Prime Minister. Yet the supposedly no-nonsense northern politician has spent years wriggling around it. Footage from 2022 which has just come to light shows Burnham dismissing women who wanted female-only toilets and changing rooms as a "quite small minority". "I want to say this loud and clear," he declared. "Don't start culture wars in Greater Manchester because we are not interested in it."

He went further still: "I don't want to see people standing up for trans rights and people supposedly standing up for women's rights arguing on the streets of Manchester." Supposedly! In a single word, Burnham revealed exactly what he thinks of campaigners unwilling to pretend that a man can become a woman.

But when he comes to knock on doors in Makerfield, ahead of his widely anticipated challenge to Keir Starmer, Burnham may be surprised to discover that most voters do not share his views. Polling conducted after last year's Supreme Court ruling, which confirmed that sex in law means biological sex, found that a majority of the public supported excluding trans-identified men from women's toilets, prisons and sports.

During his tenure as mayor, Burnham has put public money where his mouth is. In 2025, it emerged that his Greater Manchester Combined Authority had spent £179,827 on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, while £112,000 went to the LGBT Foundation to deliver "non-binary inclusion" training programmes.

And there are real victims when policy is shaped around gender ideology rather than biological reality. Earlier this week came the gut-churning case of a severely mentally ill woman reportedly raped after being placed on a psychiatric ward with men. Hospital staff may not have recognised her vulnerability as a woman. But the men on the ward did.

Burnham is worse than wrong; he's a coward. Faced with an obviously absurd ideology, he did what too many Labour politicians did: nodded along, smeared critics as hateful and hoped the public would stay quiet.

But the wannabe PM should ask himself this: nearly a century after equal suffrage was won, why should any self-respecting woman vote for a man who doesn't respect her rights?

• Jo Bartosch is an author, journalist and women's rights campaigner. Her latest book is Pornocracy