The Conservatives have announced they want to clarify the Equality Act by specifying that the protected characteristic of “sex” means “biological sex”. As the Act stands, it’s unclear whether or not the female “sex” technically includes biological males who have changed their legal gender; and equally, whether it excludes biological females who have done the same.
Among other confusions, this has caused knock-on opacity about how single-sex services are legally defined and how they may operate. In practice, the result has been lessened protection for women from men seeking the status of womanhood for libidinous reasons, and a lot of understandable fear and anger.
Writing in spirited defence of the proposal yesterday, Minister for Women and Equalities Kemi Badenoch asked: “Many will ask, ‘Why hasn’t this been done already?’”If they do, they’ll have a point. For at least six years it has been clear that, in conjunction with tortuous wording in the Gender Recognition Act, the formulation of equality law negatively impinges upon women’s safety and privacy.
For every one of those six years, the Conservatives have been in power; yet only now do they offer the unpicking of the legal mess as a lure to the electorate. As the relevant Minister, Badenoch deserves congratulations for working in a serious and committed fashion to bring the issue to the forefront of party attention, in an intensely hostile environment, but her senior colleagues have hardly helped.
On the contrary: time and again key figures cowed by political organisations like Stonewall have implied that it’s inhumane to differentiate facts about human biology from feelings of gender identity or the possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate. First Johnson, then Sunak have flip-flopped wildly over whether to pursue Stonewall’s favoured ban on so-called “conversion therapy” practices (that is: whether to prohibit therapists from respectfully disagreeing with clients who state they are “really” of the opposite sex, or wish they were).
Former Minister for Women and Equalities Penny Mordaunt dutifully recited the mantra “transwomen are women” at the dispatch box. And as Chair of the Women and Equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes has acted as chief Tory enthusiast for a raft of activist-approved measures, including the removal of medical restrictions upon who can legally change gender and the approval of males into women’s spaces without legal change, as long as they declare feelings of womanhood on the way in.
Why has it taken the Conservatives so long to attempt a resolution to this fiasco? Part of the reason must be that they were amongst its principal architects. Far from shoring up the Equality Act in favour of single-sex services where needed, Maria Miller MP set the ball rolling to dismantle them, chairing a scandalously one-sided Women and Equalities Committee inquiry into what was deemed “Transgender Equality” in 2016. This recommended that males with Gender Recognition Certificates be allowed into woman-only spaces and services without restriction, and implied that in many cases males without certificates should be granted access too.
Then, in 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May initiated the pursuit of “streamlining and demedicalising” the process for acquiring a Gender Recognition Certificate –something that was manifestly bound to cause further interference with the terms of the Equality Act in practice. Three years later, Nokes launched another inquiry into “Reform of the Gender Recognition Act”, once again recommending loosening the restrictions on who could legally change gender as an outcome.
Successive leaders after May have been utterly cowardly about facing up to her damaging legacy in this area, pretending not to notice as Stonewall-backed law became embedded into both public and private institutions on an epic scale. Within only a few years, prisons, hospital wards, swimming pools, rape crisis services, schools, universities, domestic violence shelters, and nightclubs have all rewritten their policies, permitting male strangers to get up close and personal with females as they undress, use the bathroom, or sleep.
Female complainants have been vilified for being “transphobic” – sometimes even by Conservative MPs. For the Party to address this mare’s nest only now – advertising on social media yesterday that “we know what a woman is”, in supposed contrast to Starmer’s Labour – is rich, to say the least. There is no doubt that the Conservative Party knew all along what a woman was. Whether it cared, is another matter entirely.
