Transcription of the first part...
My question is about Penny’s record on women rights. So Penny when you were Minister for Women and Equalities you wanted to change the law that would allow any man to change the sex on his birth certificate to say that he’d been born female. No doctors, no surgery, just on his say so alone. But when Liz Truss took over she said no - that checks and balances must stay to safeguard women’s rights. So Penny my question is if you become PM would you reverse this and make sex self ID law to let anyone swap the sex on their birth certificate?
So I’ve never supported self ID, there are some people that socially transition but what we were looking at was the GRA, and it’s a process that people go through. There was clamour to separate that out from healthcare and I disagreed with that so what you’ve said Nicola is not a reflection of my position at any time.
I think that we needed to do some things to make it easier for people to access services, the waiting list for services were a couple of years. There were things that we could do help people actually have their documents like driving licenses and passports actually in the same gender, terrible problems for people when that didn’t happen but you have not characterised my position.
And I support also women only spaces, I like the fact that in England we have refuges for women and transwomen, I don’t support the scheme in Scotland where all refuges have to provide places for trans people.
You did say in the HOC that TWAW, do you still believe that?
In law, some are.
I’m a woman, I’m a biological woman, if I had a mastectomy in future years I’d still be a woman, I’m a woman in every cell of my body. I’m also legally a woman and people who have been through the gender recognition process, gender reassignment, some people will have a birth certificate reissued to them in their new gender and in law they will be in their new gender and when you’re writing law about those people you have to take that into account. That doesn’t mean they’re identical to me and a lot of the issues you’re hearing now, I was talking about 3 or 4 years ago. I set up an enquiry into a lot of young girls being moved into trans services for example, I also raised the sports issue which is something I feel very strongly about because in my naval career I compete against men and I always come last.
A lot of your opponents are bringing this subject up to try and damage you, Stella Braveman said the other day when you were bringing in gender equality legislation you insisted on the phrase “people who are pregnant” in the legislation.
No, again I’m sorry this the kind of thing some of my opponents are doing. That is not true, I had no input onto the drafting of that bill. It was given to me literally the day before it was going to be put through the house, it had been cleared by cabinet, I had no input into the drafting but in my stewardship of the bill through the house I put, errr, allowed, amendments in that amended the bill to…
You didn’t put an amendment yourself though…
No
Those were amendments from people in the House of Lords…
No, they were but I suggested to the drafters that they errr put those words in errrr and they wanted to wait for amendments from the Lords because they like to do that, to give concessions to the Lords, but I was very happy with that and what we did was we used the word “mother” because it’s a female word but it’s also legally correct.