Penny Mordaunt hits back at ‘woke’ tag as she joins Tory leadership race

Penny Mordaunt has formally launched her bid to be Conservative leader with an apparent rolling back of her previous view about trans rights, a sign of how important so-called culture war issues could be in the contest to replace Boris Johnson.

Before even releasing her initial campaign video announcing her candidacy, Mordaunt tweeted to insist that opponents were trying to falsely portray here as “woke”.

The Portsmouth North MP, who is a trade minister, has long been known as one of the outliers in the party , speaking publicly in support of trans rights.

In a former role as equalities minister, Mordaunt said that “trans men are men, and trans women are women”, a statement that sets out the current legal basis for gender recognition but has become an increasingly fraught area of debate over issues such as safe spaces for women.

This has led to Mordaunt being criticised by some Conservative factions. The former defence minister wrote on Twitter: “I am biologically a woman. If I have a hysterectomy or mastectomy, I am still a woman. And I am legally a woman.

“Some people born male and who have been through the gender recognition process are also legally female. That DOES NOT mean they are biological women, like me.”

Mordaunt said: “All my life, I’ve fought for gender equality. I’ve stood up for women,” pointing to her work as equalities minister, saying she had opposed gender-neutral language and campaigned about women’s sport.

She added: “Some want to damage my reputation for whatever reason. They want to depict me as ‘woke’.”

The debate is a sign of the growing importance of US-style culture war politics to the Conservative party.

Two candidates, the attorney general, Suella Braverman, and the former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, have explicitly aimed their campaigns as being opposed to socially liberal language and policies.

Launching her campaign with an article in the Times, Badenoch reiterated her opposition to identity-based politics, saying this led to “coercive control, the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate”.

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Announcing her bid on ITV’s Peston show last week, Braverman said: “We need to get rid of all of this woke rubbish.”

A vehement culture warrior, in 2019 Braverman was criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews for saying Conservatives were engaged in “a battle against cultural Marxism”, a reference to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and antisemitism.

Some other declared candidates to take over from Johnson have made it plain they are less interested in such debates.

Asked on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday if trans men were men, and trans women were women, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, replied: “If there’s a Shapps administration, and I’m prime minister, I will not be spending most of my time on these kinds of issues. I think we owe everybody love and respect, and people should be able to get on and live their lives.”

Asked the same question on the show, Tom Tugendhat, the backbench Tory who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “This is one of those debates that demonstrates why we need to move on. It’s really easy to make division where we need unity. It’s really easy to try and divide communities.”