International Women’s Day Q&A with Penny Mordaunt MP, Secretary of State for International Development NOW CLOSED TO NEW QUESTIONS

[JustineMumsnet]

[EDITED BY MNHQ: Questions have now been collated and sent over - new questions may not be answered]

Hello all,

We’re very pleased to announce a Q&A with Penny Mordaunt MP, Secretary of State for International Development and Minister for Women and Equalities.

Please post your questions on this thread by lunchtime on Wednesday March 6. We’ll send on a selection to the Minister and we will post up written answers from Penny on this thread this coming Friday (March 8), International Women’s Day.

In her role as Secretary of State for International Development, Penny Mordaunt oversees DFID’s work ending extreme poverty overseas, including programmes focused on girls’ education and women’s health. DFID has been in the news recently, facing calls for its budget to be spent partly on encouraging projects that would aid British business overseas, and for it to be folded into the Foreign Office instead of being a standalone department.

In her role as Minister for Women and Equalities, Penny is also responsible for work including gender pay gap reporting and possible changes to the law concerning gender recognition.

Penny campaigned for Brexit in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum and is a Royal Naval Reservist. She has previously been Minister of State for Disabled People and Minister of State for the Armed Forces.

Please add your questions for Penny here by Wednesday lunchtime. And although it’s not a live webchat please stick to the spirit of our webchat guidelines and keep it civil.

If one topic is overwhelmingly dominating responses we might request that people don't continue to post what's effectively the same question or point. Rest assured we will ALWAYS make the recipient aware that it's an area of concern to multiple users and will encourage them to engage with those questions.

Thanks
Justine

Nb existing members will be able to post on this thread. Thanks.

trans people must, in order to legally be recognised in the gender they live their life in, change the sex marker on their birth certificate.

How do they "live in" a different "gender"? What does that even mean? Come up with a framework or give it up.

*I understand that the Women and Equalities Committee has recently awarded money to Stonewall to train schools. What checks have been done on the training and by who to ensure that it doesn’t negatively impact on safeguarding children and the rights of women and girls? This is particularly important due to the recent scandals of David Challenor (father of Aimee Challenor who is influential at Stonewall) being inprisoned for the sadistic rape and torture of a ten year girl, the petition against Stonewall by leading Gay and Transsexual activists and the resignation of Ruth Hunt.

If the advice being given to schools by Stonewall is later found to be incorrect and harm occurs to a child due to schools following this advice, who will be liable and pay any compensation due? Will it be individual schools or will it be the Government?*

Can I assume the answer to this is ‘no we haven’t checked what we’ve funded and he have no interest in the safeguarding of women and children’?

And

‘We’ll be throwing school leaders under a bus’

Yes I don’t know why I was hoping for more in depth, personalised responses. I suppose I just thought that volunteering for a web chat was indicative of a willingness to engage properly with the issues.

Instead, we got bland, impersonal responses that feel so detached from what is going on.

Everything from MLM to sexual exploitation by aid workers, to sex specific spaces just seems to only scratch the surface and shows a complete unwillingness to understand the real issues.

It’s bizarre, surely someone would have briefed her on what Forever Living etc is? Surely someone would have briefed her that organisations are acting in direct contravention of the current Equality Act by allowing people to self ID with zero evidence? What about a briefing about how children are not being carefully given individualised cautious treatment programmes in conjunction with their families, but are instead being actively encouraged to keep things from their parents and begin untested medications and treatments at the first sign of displaying behaviours even remotely outside of their sex/gender stereotype?

What’s the point in offering to engage when the responses might as well be in a FAQ on a website somewhere?

Living in a gender while changing the sex marker on the birth certificate - could you muddle gender and sex any more thoroughly? Confused nonsense.

If your excuse that the reason women have to accept a total loss of identity as a recognisable entity, or any right to privacy, is because birth certificates only offer male and female options with no box for 'transwoman', then here's a master stroke for you. Change the ruddy birth certificates and add a box, that's not exactly something beyond the power of the government. Considering you're erasing women as a species and throwing women's rights back a century, and you're making birth certification fictional anyway that change is mere peanuts by comparison.

But you won't, because this has nothing to do with birth certificates.

What does a man transwoman say to a doctor when they have prostate issues? Is that a thing, do they tell the Dr their sex, or do they deceive the dcotor and claim to be xx when they are xy and just take on the chin the resultant wrong differential dx ?

Women don't display the same heart attack symptoms, and they are far more likely to suffer bladder infections, how far is this going to go, the denial of actual biology.

It was a lesson in telling MN to stfu, and DFODs

Since birth certificates only provide either male or female options, how about it records the truth of the matter?

How about that for an idea?

This policy that we simply must change birth certificates in order to specifically record the sex that someone is NOT is just bonkers.

As a girl I was subject to sexual abuse and rape perpetrated against me for many years by an adult male relative. Single sex spaces have been absolutely vital to enable me to intergrate in society, especially as when I experienced the regular sexual harassment etc that is a common experience of very many women.

Penny Mourdant, what are you doing to ensure that the needs of girls and women are always and explicitly considered whenever a single sex space is changed to a mixed sex space by the fact that legal or biological males are now able to enter and use it?

I am now, at some cost to myself, having to speak up to try and protect abused girls and women from policies that will cause significant harm to their wellbeing, recovery and social integration. Btw I met with my MP who repeatedly minimised the impact of sexual abuse on the mental health of girls and was only concerned with the needs of transgender people. He is very keen for the government etc to introduce self id GRA proposals and he was not willing to express my concerns to the relevant government departments.*

I cannot put into words the disgust I feel at this one being ignored. How devoid of empathy do you have to be?

I just lost my faith in humanity.

The idea that public records should reflect fiction based on personal choice over objective fact is bonkers. What is the point of keeping any public records at all if they're fictionalised if the person wants it to be?

Which MSP was it that pointed out a choice was going to need to be made as to whether the next census provided actual real data as a basis for a state managing and dealing with its responsibilities to its citizens or whether it was going to be written by Hans Christian Anderson.

So Penny won't (can't) define "woman".

And therefore can't define her job. Which explains a lot.

Repeal all questions indicating the direct harm and safeguarding issues to women and girls were ignored. This apparently is not to be acknowledged by the government.

This inability to either face or discuss it demonstrates clearly that the government knows it is true, but cannot acknowledge it while standing behind the belief that men must be allowed to be women if they want to. It also implies that they do not quite have the courage to say up front that harm to women and girls is acceptable collateral damage, but this is their underlying belief.

Whoever persuaded you this was a good idea, Penny?

I just lost my faith in humanity.

Those in charge have sold their proverbial souls. Humanity only exists lower down the chain.
It why we can't look up for protection from this.

@Bluestitch
Q. Do you have any explanation for how a policy was allowed to exist that enabled a male bodied, legally male rapist to self ID as a woman and be placed in a women's prison?
Answer
This is an area for my colleagues at the Ministry of Justice… We need to be sensitive… – we have seen transgender women commit suicide in men’s prisons, and we have seen the horrific case of Karen White. Nobody should be put in a space that causes a risk to them, or a risk to others^

I've had it with this emotional blackmail put on women.

The implication from her answer is that the TW committed suicide because they were in the men's prison which is speculation. (Womem and male prisoners frequently kill themselves in male or female prisons for all sorts of reasons the rate is absolutely unacceptably high)

The other implication is that it's equally risky or dangerous to put a man in a man's prison as it is to put a man in a woman's prison which is obviously bollocks. Putting any man in a woman's prison is by far more risky to the prison population at large, risk of pregnancy for starters as just the beginning.

These false suicide stats as means of blackmail have had their day.

Oh dear, Penny.

eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-blog/2019/3/14/the-day-that-mumsnet-took-down-penny-mordaunt-mp

The Minister was extremely busy today announcing this in the house;

14 March 2019
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Penny Mordaunt)
This is LBT women’s health week. We know that lesbian, bisexual and transgender women are less likely to participate in services such as cancer screening, which means that they face a wide range of health inequalities. That must stop. As part of our LGBT action plan, we will shortly announce the appointment of a national LGBT health adviser to help to improve the delivery of healthcare services for LGBT people. We will also announce the membership of the new LGBT advisory panel before the first conference, which will take place next week.

This is LBT women’s health week. We know that lesbian, bisexual and transgender women are less likely to participate in services such as cancer screening, which means that they face a wide range of health inequalities.

So disingenuous. MTFs face many different health problems to women.

I think tweeting and sharing the thread and that brilliant article is the way to go. Shine a light ladies.

Not least because of the bloody amazing questions on here.

Dear Penny

Given that research in your ministry doesn't seem to include clicking links, I'll give you the conclusion of the blog I linked to above (you might also like to note that what gets said on here is noticed off here. Weird, I know, that anyone would be interested in what we have to say, but there you go):

And finally, can the Minister for Women even define what is a woman? On this showing, the answer would seem to be No. The actual Minister for Woman apparently doesn’t ‘get it’, doesn’t want to ‘get it’, and seemingly can’t be bothered to ‘get it’. That’s a lot of women’s votes that have just been lost, whichever way you look at it. Post-modern, philosophical ideologies of feelings, and misunderstandings of the difference between sex and gender, should never, ever compromise the safeguarding of children. People who raise red flags about safeguarding deserve to be taken seriously and to have their voices heard. If we’ve we’ve learned nothing else during the past decade, surely to God we’ve learned that.

Think on, Penny, think on.

LangCleg

That article is a thing of beauty, where’s it from?

I think my personal favourite part of this thread has been watching her deploy the known TRA tactic of bleating on about period poverty to make it look like you care about women.

And my prediction is that Penny will now resign and try and pretend it was on principle over Brexit.

That article is a thing of beauty, where’s it from?

I wondered what was being said on Twitter, if anything, about this webchat - and lo, there it was!

Well I expected bad. It was worse.

Someone really should tell these people that if they want questions about buggies and recipes it's not going to happen. And if you arent prepared to be honest and direct with answers then we will know. And we will see it. However smart people think they are with their non answers. There are so many people here who are far smarter.

you only have to think for a nano second to see that LBT women's health week is a nonsense
and that allowing people to self ID their sex in a clinical setting is likely to put them at greater risk of ill health
words fail me once again

First rule of being 'women's' minister; find out the dictionary definition of 'woman'. FAIL.