No, the GOVERNMENT had a responsibility to consult women, not the trans lobby.
See also with regards the more recent 2016 Women's & Equalities report as discussed in Janice Turner's interview with Maria Miller MP:
(extract)
Many of its recommendations, to redress hate crime against transgender people, to improve access to NHS services and stop discrimination in employment (as seen in President Trump’s cruel, summary banning of up to 6,600 transgender US military personnel), are widely supported. But one proposal that seeks to change the very definition of “man” and “woman” has far-reaching implications.
Justine Greening, the equalities minister, announced her support this week for changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, echoing calls by Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader. At present a person who wishes to change gender legally must be 18, demonstrate they have lived in their chosen gender for two years, have a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” (a mental disorder whereby a person feels they don’t feel they belong in their biological sex) and be questioned by an expert panel.
The heart of the controversy is the view, espoused by Ms Miller’s report, that switching gender should instead merely be a matter of “self-definition”. A man need only “declare” that he is a woman. Your gender is what you feel it to be: there would be no requirement even to take female hormones or have surgery — about 70 per cent of trans women still have intact male genitals — or even “present” as a woman to be legally female. (Some older trans people are troubled by this, believing that it trivialises and delegitimises their struggles to live in their non-birth gender.)
Furthermore, if the law changes, “gender identity” is likely to become a protected characteristic under equalities legislation: ie if you deny a person is a woman or a man when they claim to be, you are guilty of discrimination or hate crime.
When Ms Miller, 53, released her report in January last year she was surprised that criticism came not from conservatives but, as she put it, “women who purport to be feminists”. This may be because feminists, well versed in sexual politics and long-time supporters of gay rights, are among the few people who can penetrate the arcane, confusing terminology.
Many see potential loopholes and conflicts of rights that put women at risk, giving men access to rare female-only spaces such as single-sex wards, changing rooms and domestic violence refuges, designed to keep them safe and private. It is these concerns I put to Ms Miller in her Basingstoke constituency." (continues)
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2993425-Maria-Miller-interviewed-by-Janice-Turner-full-text
Professor Kathleen Stock's analysis of the serious flaws in the inquiry and report in speech at House of Lords Oct 10th 2018
(extract)
"As I hope is clear to everyone by now — thanks to campaigns like that of A Woman’s Place and Fair Play for Women — when it comes to developing public policy around legally changing sex, there are several sets of interests at stake, and not just one.
To put it in a nutshell: if you’re going to make it very easy for members of the biological male sex, socialised as men, to get the word ‘female’ written on their birth certificates, you are going to get at least two problems, simply put:
· more opportunities for some males to harass females, because now males can be more easily legally treated as females, and so have greater access to females.
and
· an undermining of the positive actions which have historically promoted equality of opportunity for females; because now some males can ‘self-identify as females’ and so get access to these opportunities (all-women shortlists being the obvious example).
You are also going to get a lot of confusion for questioning, gender-non-conforming, children, working out who they are in a world in which ‘changing sex’ is now apparently easy.
So the question for all of us is: how to balance these competing interests?
I want to talk about how, in attempting to answer that question, public organisations are being misleadingly advised, sometimes with harmful results." (continues)
medium.com/@kathleenstock/womens-place-talk-full-text-house-of-lords-oct-10th-2018-b1f3d70c4559