ChewyLouie
I've seen a number of influential TRAs refer to Penny Mordant as Minister for Equalities (sans women) & am inclined to believe them in this case.
Over the summer Victoria Atkins MP (Minister for Women) voiced concerns about the steep rise in children seeking medical interventions following the questioning their gender identity. The government has announced there will be an enquiry.
In recent Westminster debate, her comments were reported by James Kirkup in Spectator article 21/11/2018:
'This MP has summed up everything wrong with the transgender debate'
(extract)
For new readers, this debate really boils down to who gets to be a woman. How should the law deal with people who are born male and retain a male body who identify themselves as a woman? Should they be able to gain the rights, entitlements and legal status of a woman on the basis of that self-identification? The government has consulted on changing the law to make it easier to legally change gender; some people support that, some people don’t. More of that in a minute.
If you’re interested in this stuff, you can read the whole Commons thing here , but for me there are a couple of things that stand out.
First, Victoria Atkins, the minister for women and equalities at the Home Office is a good thing, and someone surely heading for more senior ministerial office in due course. Ministerial responses to Westminster Hall debates are often boilerplate bromides written by officials and recited unthinkingly by the minister concerned. Atkins’ contribution was a lot better than that, and strongly suggests a minister who has taken the time to think critically about the issues (and actors) in an area where critical thinking has been painfully lacking.
Again, I don’t endorse everything Atkins said (I think she’s a tiny bit blasé about how effectively the Equality Act 2010’s single-sex exemptions are being implemented in everyday practice) but her general approach and tone were the right: it’s a complicated, contentious issue where loud voices on the extremes have drowned out and sometimes silenced legitimate questions.
Here are two eminently reasonable Atkins quotes that should be utterly uncontroversial but which are, in this context, refreshingly bold:
‘People are sometimes almost too scared to talk about things, which is not right. We do not want a climate of fear in the debate. We want people to be able to express their views respectfully and in a caring and careful manner, so that we ensure that questions are flushed out and answered.’
And:
‘I get asked about this issue regularly, and we all share a sense of sadness about the fact that this important debate sometimes gets taken over by loud and sometimes aggressive campaigning by activists. I am sure they hold their beliefs very strongly, but they perhaps lose sight of the fact that we have to be able to talk about this issue in a reasoned, respectful and caring fashion. The vast majority of the public—and, I am sure, parliamentarians—are in the middle. We want to talk about this issue in a caring and careful way so society gets to a position in which we are all comfortable with the consequences of the changes to legislation and so on.’
(NB: she didn’t identify those ‘activists’, which strikes me as a deft bit of politics, since it allows everyone to conclude that she was talking about Other People and not them.)
And since I was earlier this year very angry that the Commons did not debate the case of the rapist Karen White, I should note that the minister addressed that case thus:
‘I want to be clear that the case of Karen White is appalling. There was a series of terrible failings that should never have happened. In the light of that, my ministerial colleagues at the Ministry of Justice are looking again at the decision-making systems that apply to the management of transgender prisoners, as well as how they were applied in that case.’
Which strikes me as going a little further than the Ministry of Justice has done on the issue, but I’ll have to leave it to others to pursue that.
All I can do here is to conclude that Victoria Atkins appears to be doing a pretty good job of handling a very prickly issue without resorting to the unthinking sloganeering or simple political cowardice that some of her colleagues have been guilty of." (continues with criticism & consequences of Layla Moran MP's comments re seeing a person's soul rather than sex & insistence that TWAW etc)
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/11/this-mp-has-summed-up-everything-wrong-with-the-transgender-debate/