UNTIL 2005 Lewis Moonie was Labour MP for my home town of Kirkcaldy in Fife. First elected in 1987, shortly before I moved away, Moonie made it to Westminster without receiving my vote, which instead helped the Conservatives stay ahead of the SNP. Not that he required my support: at the time, Kirkcaldy was one of many Scottish constituencies in which the Labour vote was said to be not counted but weighed, presumably on industrial-strength scales.

When the Fife constituencies were reorganised for the 2005 election, the then junior defence minister conveniently became a life peer, bequeathing his seat to neighbouring MP Gordon Brown by heading for the Lords. And there Baron Moodie of Bennochy (an area of Kirkcaldy) has remained, undetected on my radar until earlier this year when it was reported that he had been reprimanded by the Labour Party for ‘retweeting controversial posts on transgender issues’.

Before entering politics Lewis Moonie worked as a ‘psychiatrist and community medicine specialist’; in recent times the former medic has been unwilling to acquiesce in the fantasy that men can self-identify as women and vice versa. The doubting doctor instead espouses the increasingly heretical view that ‘trans women are men’ and ‘trans men are women’.

On his Twitter account Moonie self-identifies, in inverted commas, as a ‘Terf’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). He has cheerfully adopted what usually is a pejorative term and defends the preservation of single-sex spaces: ‘Trans people have the same rights as anyone else. What they don’t have is the right to force me to believe they acquire the sex they aspire to, nor to invade single sex spaces protected by the Equality Act 2010 unless they have undergone reassignment.’

Such opinion has become sacrilegious to the Left, which now decrees that Trans rights trump the entitlements and safety of women. LGBT Labour, who evidently prioritise the ‘T’, unsurprisingly took great delight in announcing ‘We welcome the suspension of Lord Moonie’, whom they accused of being multi-phobic.