Fears Rishi Sunak will renege on promise to clarify definition of biological sex

[IwantToRetire]

Rishi Sunak is facing calls to make a public “cast iron guarantee” to follow through on a pledge to rewrite equality law to protect women, amid Tory MPs’ fears that he will renege on his promise.

Conservative backbenchers are planning to challenge Maria Caulfield, the minister for women, to give an undertaking in the Commons that Mr Sunak will deliver on his promised legal changes to ensure that “mothers and women are not erased from public life”.

Sources close to the Prime Minister insist he remains committed to the pledge, with one saying that the Government is carefully considering advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on the matter and another saying, “It’s certainly not being delayed or dropped”.

But senior Tories fear that the party will lose its opportunity to change the law if Mr Sunak fails to act swiftly ahead of an election next year.

One backbencher said: “There is a debate within government about whether this is a hill to die on and it’s unclear how much of a row the Government wants, doing this in the run-up to an election. But if they can’t say what a woman is by the time we go into an election we’re in trouble.”

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A Telegraph article reprinted by Yahoo Fears Rishi Sunak will renege on promise to clarify definition of biological sex (yahoo.com)

I wonder at the motive of the DT for pursuing this (not complaining just wondering)

Also confused:
Maria Caulfied is not the Minister for Women see https://www.gov.uk/government/people/maria-caulfield
Kemi Badenoch is the Minister for Women https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/minister-for-women-and-equalities--3

Wonder why the article refers to MC as being the one who should ask Sunak in the House of Commons to clarify. Is there some signifigance in this that I dont understand?

Reality matters. No point in indulging in if Labour were in power... fanfic.

We are where we are because of the Tory party. They are still in power and could repair this if they had the will. The fight is happening now.

They are still in power and could repair this if they had the will. The fight is happening now.

Absolutely this.

With the added pressure of if any of the other parties win the next election, trying to repair women's rights and equality and access is going to be horrifically harder, because we won't be trying to get them to do something from a standing still position. We'll be trying to slow a head long gallop into misogynist heaven.

I disagree and find your "fanfic" point rather childish. If we want to, we can point out the fact of the GRA and who was responsible.

This has mushroomed across the West with the rise of Big Tech. We are an outlier if you look at the US, Canada, Australia, Spain...there is a bigger picture.

I agree I want the current government to do much more. But I'm not myopic. We can't afford to ignore the wider context if we want to start to put this right.

What wider context is needed for the Tories to fix this?

IANAL but I gather they can go the statutory instrument route. But they need to have an indication there's a problem (prisons, rape crisis, health and so on), have the advice from the right body (EHRC), and evidence there's a need from elected representatives (Monday's debate), and those things have to happen in an order for due process to take place. The government has to weigh all this up, and not be rushed.

Pending the outcome of the debate - and the quality of what's said in it - then I don't see why they can't put a statutory instrument through Parliament. I'm not sure what would stop them, unless something emerges in the debate or some astonishing and solid evidence from Stonewall and co is produced.

The wider context is that many other Western countries have gone full steam ahead with Self ID and laws that prohibit women from having services / spaces / sporting events separate from men. As ResisterRex already pointed out we are an outlier. Whilst we may not have made the progress that we would like in terms of strengthening women's rights the government have not (yet) implemented laws that will be almost impossible to reverse once they have been passed. The government have u-turned on self ID, they have blocked the GRR bill in Scotland, they have commissioned the Cass review, they selected Baroness Faulkner for chair of the EHRC, they have put the breaks on and listened when they could quite easily have just ploughed on with reform in an attempt to make themselves look progressive. I feel like they've held a space for women to be able to build up a resistance and start a conversation so that when Labour do finally get into power it will be much more difficult for them to go full steam ahead with GRA reform / self ID / keeping children's transition in school secret from parents / allowing males into female prisons etc.

It does seem that this upcoming WM debate will give us a strong indication of whether the Tories/Sunak are going to do what they said they'd do and fix the Equality Act, or fudge it and kick the ball down the road.

The outcome will probably decide my vote, tbh.

I do wish the Tories would do more though. Just read this story and honestly wtf...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/10/gender-ideology-foster-mother-nearly-lost-children-class/

How does any of that prevent the Tory government from fixing this now? After all for years we've been told that they "know what a woman is" and that they are "rolling back" on this bullshit.

They only introduced it in 2017, how long do they need to fix it?

Unfortunately whatever any of us think is the priority, the bandwidth for the Tories to get anything done is getting narrower.

And apart from the ongoing crises that are impacting all of our lives, there is no doubt that the Tories and now in full in fighting mode, and purely for personal spite not any genuine political analysis, the Boris Bros and gathering to gather to make Sunak's life a misery.

And of course the actual problem is all the MPs who are prioritising trans rights over women's rights. With this being the status quo, nobody can "just get it done".

Its not as though TRAs are suddenly going to say, oh we're so sorry, we've been wrong all along, we totally agree that women are biological females.

They have dug in response to the few minor concessions from the Tories, and are going to hold MPs to account in public. There will be more than a few toys thrown out of the pram if the MPs who have been stonewalled dont turn up tomorrow to speak against women's rights.

“Thinking historically, the Thatcher government used very cynically the ‘threat of gay men and lesbians to children in schools and public life’ as an electoral move and it helped their re-election.

“The Conservative party know that you can mobilise fear in a way that can win you some votes. Whether it will succeed I don’t know. There’s certainly an attempt to stoke fear about trans people and that will be deployed towards the election unfairly.”

“I do feel hopeful because I think trans people and the LGBT community more broadly is being heard more and at the moment that’s deeply controversial, but in 10 years’ time, the fact those voices have been heard will have had its effect as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/10/government-fanning-culture-war-over-free-speech-says-uks-first-lgbtq-history-professor

There are many people who dont know or dont care about either trans issues or women's rights, but who will happily adopt this position as it suits their political stance of never trust a tory.

(I heard this man being interviewed on Radio 4 news, and not once did the interviewer - suprise, surprise - ask him about concerns expressed about women's rights from the trans agenda.)

They only introduced it in 2017, how long do they need to fix it?

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “it” here. What did they introduce in 2017 and what do they need to fix?

If you mean self ID, they did introduce the idea and then they did a u-turn after a consultation so there’s nothing really to fix there because nothing happened. It’s frustrating they haven’t gone further in the right direction by clarifying the meaning of the PC of sex in the EA but political change rarely happens “now” especially when it is a contentious issue and against the flow of what is happening across the Western world. The point is things haven’t got a whole lot worse (although arguably they have in schools) and some progress has been made in some areas and I just think it has been beneficial for women for things to have stood still for a while and hopefully when Labour do gain power they will do less damage than they might have done on this particular issue because women are now organised and ready to fight any madcap gender ID policies that Labour attempt to introduce.

‘The government have u-turned on self ID, they have blocked the GRR bill in Scotland, they have commissioned the Cass review’

Signalbox sorry that’s not quite right. It matters that the Cass review was commissioned by the NHS. Independent of the Tory government of that day. Not commissioned by any government at all. That would have been a Tory government being protective of distressed children who have focused on gender identity. But no.

So far the successive Tory governments since 2010 have done nothing to protect children except to seek to introduce Self ID, then to U turn on that (thank goodness!) in the Tories’ own electoral interests. That trajectory has then also influenced but not dictated the welcome challenge of the UK gov to the Scottish gov on their self ID plan for Scotland which is in direct conflict with the EqA across UK so such a challenge would have to have been done anyway. It’s unworkable to have laws in one nation of the UK that fit incredibly poorly with other parts of UK and are incongruent with UK law applicable in their own nation.

Institutional change takes time, and it hasn't only been since 2017 that this has been brewing. It's a lot longer, and for many, because they see it as part of the broader civil rights movement, it is extremely difficult to just reverse.

Neither MPs, not the PM, directly run the country. And very cleverly this ideology has been thoughouly indictrinated into key institutions, right down to the service user level. AT a time when new workers are in short supply.

Heck, a whole industry has grown up around making sure organizations and individuals are taught this approach and feel obliged to do it.

My recollection of 2004 GRA is of no big popular campaign around gender identity rights at all. It felt like a done deal suddenly being debated in Parliament having been (we now know) heavily influenced behind the scenes via Press for Change et al.

Reason they could get such a foothold was a legal case went to European court and in 2002 the European Court required the (then Labour) UK gov to look again at its laws because existing laws didn’t allow changing of birth certificates. And it didn’t allow a man (who wishes to present as a woman) to marry another man. Which was actually discriminatory. The religious lobby in the UK at the time would never allow same sex marriage. We only had UK civil partnerships (specifically not marriage) many years later in 2017. let alone actual gay marriage..

So the UK Labour government legally had to make some kind of response to ECHR case where someone wanted to change their birth certificate to become legally female.
The government had a choice here- instead of saying humans can’t change sex, adults should leave their birth certificates alone, and instead of supporting equal lesbian and gay rights, and correcting other unfair homophobic legal restrictions on same sex couples, or even saying it’s fine to dress or name yourself as the opposite sex.. the government of the day acted within their own homophobia, and kowtowed to the religious lobby of all parties and to the TRAs. The government’s best way to respond to the challenge was to take literally and support the sexist and homophobic fiction of ‘born in the wrong body’, as a neat solution. Rather than to stick with material reality and to try to legally promote actual equality around sexual orientation and women’s rights.

And therefore the GRA was hastily cobbled together, by what sounds like Press for Change working much too closely with civil servants who in combination were so misogynistic, unquestioning and usefully idiotic that that they
-didn’t include anything at all in GRA to deal with the legal possibility that women could have a GRC saying they are male and still get pregnant and have kids
-didn’t allow for people to change their mind later and wish to revoke their GRC, naking it a lifelong and irreversible status, unless GRC holder says they had lied to start with- which shows no understanding of consent and is highly othering of people who are trans.

I’d imagine the drafting team didn’t ask enough questions, and assumed or they were told that all men seeking GRC would have ‘a sex change’ operation. And I see in that a wholly male-centric view that a man who lives voluntarily without his penis could ever wish to consider himself male, or could ever still be seen as a man again.

They clearly felt that penisless men might as well actually be women… which is wildly insulting to both men and women. And that’s why detransition never seems to have crossed their minds as something they’d need GRA to be dealing with.

Signalbox sorry that’s not quite right. It matters that the Cass review was commissioned by the NHS.

Thanks Slothtoes my mistake.

It was this that had me confused. I’d assumed that the government had ordered it…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/09/16/minister-orders-inquiry-4000-per-cent-rise-children-wanting/

Cass Review was Hancock

"Even more credit should go to health secretaries such as Matt Hancock who in the midst of the pandemic pushed for the commissioning of the review by Dr Hilary Cass that led to the closing of the Tavistock and also his successor, Sajid Javid, who provided support when I raised numerous concerns that the Department of Health refused to prioritise."

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0df1a300-1022-11ed-b7aa-67f5549661eb?shareToken=9f447178d1a36a207bf13a1cd7e0e16a

Oh yes I remember that now. So the Cass review was instigated by the Tories? I’m confused now.

On Cass, I thought that Mordaunt said she would commission research? But when I looked at that (GEO page, IIRC) it didn't seem to have led anywhere.

Then there was more and more in the press, and then there was Cass. As pushed for by parents, ex-GIDS staff (and serving?), some MPs and then Hancock.

I think this was my understanding too.

I’ve found the posts on the lead up to where we are interesting

The talk this morning is Johnson’s mutiny has fallen flat, hopefully so. I don’t really care that much about him either way and have a different view on partygate but he is good at making politics about him, stirring, getting airtime and headlines which just makes it harder for something like this issue to get attention.

Labour and Lib Dem have made it clear that they don’t care, or actively see women as dinosaurs, unless they have a penis so that’s not hopeful.

Thank you for this summary Slothtoes!

This is why, if Johnson does decide to stand in Dorries' seat at the by-election, it would be amazing if KJK stood against him.

Grab that airtime and headlines.

Statutory instrument is what's needed, according to Maya

twitter.com/mforstater/status/1668162787049103360?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

twitter.com/mforstater/status/1668162788710129664?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ