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?

Signalbox thanks and ResisterRex thank you for the Times article link. it’s really interesting to read Kemi Badenoch’s version of events.

Even she doesn’t claim that the Cass review is an appointed-by-government report (of which there are many across all areas of government policy) though. It’s not going to be one of those government reports with the foreword from the Secretary of State or a junior minister on it. It’s not going to even get a direct government response I guess, or at least government isn’t obliged to give a response as they would to say a Parliamentary report. It’s ‘just’ an NHS independent advisory report, which publishes publicly. which is great because it will be very influential on policy and focus on the evidence for what is being commissioned (or lack of it).

I have no idea what support from a Health Minister might have been signalled for what became Cass behind the scenes during the pandemic (as Kemi Badenoch says happened ) but frankly none of us normal people can know because if that happened, it wasn’t made public.

If I am wrong about that I’d be interested to hear any insider accounts of that or to see anything that was made public supporting Hancock’s involvement in commissioning Cass review at the time. (And of course I would be very happy to be wrong and to find a lot of Ministerial support for not medically or surgically transing kids- that would be absolutely brilliant.)

But even giving Kemi and Matt Hancock the benefit of the doubt- the pandemic was in 2020 and for many many years prior women have been writing to successive Health Secretaries and Ministers and their MPs with their concerns.

And still literally nothing has been said or done by government about children being given permanent invasive ‘medical treatment’ which has terrible known side effects and no evidence of permanent benefit or of safety. That is a medical scandal.

The Cass Review NHS-commissioned because of the legal commissioning responsibilities for children’s GIDS services that the NHS has. Cass’ role isn’t to stop the current practice of GIDS at all. It’s to gather up the available research and then present that, so it can better inform the commissioning of future services by the decision makers in the NHS.

I would have hoped that with this scandal being pointed out by women and parents and detransitioned adults, and then with the carefully evidenced and crowdfunded legal actions that women like Keira Bell have been taking- that any concerned Health Minister over the past decade plus would have set up a total moratorium on PBs or cross sex hormones being legally prescribed for kids in the UK, pending robust research assuring these patients of safety and effectiveness. But no.

Nadhim Zahawi as education Minister said for example that schools should not socially transition kids without the knowledge of parents. I’d have to research whether that was at all binding on schools and I don’t have the time to do that right now. But even if Hancock or any Health Minister could have just said something about the concerning lack of evidence for something so invasive and permanent that’s being done to kids, that might have helped? He didn’t though- none of them have.

Kemi Badenoch’s self congratulatory tone for me is therefore quite misplaced. She actually in that Times article to seem to blame the opposition for not pressing the incumbent government on this issue- as if that were some kind of excuse as to why government haven’t acted? Plus she also seemed to blame journalists for being too scared to tell the truth- when actually investigative journalists like Deborah Cohen and Hannah Barnes at BBC Newsnight and well informed commentators Janice Turner at The Times, have been telling this exact truth for years.

For years these kids have been othered and let down by the government, who are more culpable than any opposition party. They have certainly been let down by the opposition parties too, and it’s still an ongoing scandal.

Can someone re-link the Kemi Badenoch relevant piece?

I'm very much with you here.

My take is that there is a regulatory system that is evolving globally. I don't mean evil forces or even NWO scary stuff.

I mean a human rights machine that is embedded at all levels of UN, NGOs, US government, the EU, ECHR, WHO etc.

Self ID is accelerating across the West, and now even making progress into India, N. Africa.

Only China and Russia are immune...no suprise there, and a sign of things to come.

The UK has been a major outlier in resisting Self ID and trans conversion therapy legislation, but look at Ireland, the closest country culturally to us. Together with Canada, Aussie, NZ, and more and more the US, Ireland has absolutely gone down this route, soon with some of the strictest hate speech laws globally.

No way are the Tories going to resist this for long. With a Penny Mordaunt or Rory Stewart at the helm, they will relent to the gender narrative seamlessly.

Any Leftist govt, it's a done deal.

ResisterRex - Yesterday 05:57
Thank you for that article.

I was struck by this remark. Isn’t this what has just happened with the EA ‘clarify the meaning of “Sex”’ debate?

Whitehall has solutions for ministers wishing to dodge difficult decisions: issue another call for evidence for information you already have

I agree it’s marching across the west and further, can the U.K. be an outlier?

Very difficult when major world organisations pick up gender ideology as they are

Maybe we can. Not giving up yet, not voting for Labour or Lib Dems who will be speedier than Speedy Gonzalez

That debate last night, I’m not sure we would have heard such sense on biology matters anywhere else?

US would have been woke goes to die from right and no where else is debating it.

Left would have been similar - political stick, dog whistle etc

Not giving up

Oh Dear!

Its always someone else's fault!!! though your claims do go to show how important female rights are to the Tories.... down there with changes to dog licencing :(

Bottom line is the Tories have introduced plenty of other laws but have NOT chosen to change the GRA or anything else, indeed the numbers of GRC's issued are at record numbers per year.

Proof is in the pudding as they used to say.

On the other hand the US is becoming much more resistant to males in female sports. Plenty of court cases by athletes and detransitioners and they will be in a different place.

Gender Ideology is on a march around the world for the reason it is being funded by organisations such as the George Soros 'Open Society' foundation and the 'Ptizker Foundation'.

The madness won't stop until there is serious push back and legal actions in the U.S. That effectively means that there has to be a Republican win at the next election, even though inevitably some states will go their own way as they are already increasingly doing so on any number of issues.

Mind you, i do think that legislators and media in the U.S are actually taking a lead from what is going in Britain - so I wouldn't lose all hope for the impact of what is going on here.

The best we can hope for is that Trump drops out of the race and someone else takes the helm.

More unfortunate events and shocking realisations, I imagine.

This thing is embedded and it is going to take a couple of decades, I reckon, to un-do. This is long haul, truth matters business.

I agree that US women and press are looking over here with interest.

Of course he can and will break his promises, he's a Tory. That's why I don't buy the idea of voting Tory purely on this issue. As my DH is always quoting "never trust a Tory." There are so many other areas where Tory policies do disproportionate damage to women. I'm very GC but still wouldn't vote Tory.

Who will you vote for?

I'm not suggesting you vote for a party you don't trust, but if you think a Labour administration is going to be any more trustworthy I suspect you are in for disappointment.

Starmer has rowed back on virtually all of his previous commitments now that the reality of resonsibility is dawning. All, that is, except for Self Id, which seems to be the one Corbyn relic he's most attached to.

Individual MPs are no more or less trustworthy whatever party that belong to. Theer are good and bad eggs in every batch.

Yes the US is a big factor. Trump seems to be going up in the republican poll stakes, despite criminal case

they belong to

It won't take long at all for the wheels to start coming off the Labour Party in government. They'll not be able to give the unions all they demand; they won't be able to heal the NHS; illegal migration will continue.......

My take is that misogyny and sexism and homophobia have never left us, but that the great gains of the 20th century for women arose from the huge events that society went through- Women’s Suffrage, then the seismic shocks of the two world wars and then the resulting human rights frameworks being built and the European Court of Human rights giving more rights to women democratically. Thank goodness for those frameworks and institutions, I hope they go on forever!

Plus some of the post war baby boomers then changed their expectations away from their parents’ experiences which had been shaped by war, and this was seen in what we now call the successive ‘waves’ of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s feminism. In those societies, democratic Parliaments all gave womens’ rights and lesbian and gay rights big leaps forwards.

But even in those years, religions used to provide men men a socially acceptable free pass to try to replace the restrictions on women and gay people or to think up new ones as society and technology moves forward. I think of how many times abortion rights have been challenged in Parliament, or Clause 28, or lack of lesbian and gay rights to adoption or marriage etc.

In todays’ much more secular democracies religion has lost its grip over huge swathes of the electorate (not all of it). It’s also important to note that some of the most staunch feminists support women’s rights because they are religious. But with that overall loosening grip, plus the pressure of the advance of technology and capitalism into all areas of our lives, we have a future where men in theory could be less socially dominant because their physical strength isn’t so relevant to survival or material success these days.

So I wonder if this overall now more secular Western world has got some men anxiously looking around for a tool to enforce social oppression and to give men back their place at the top of the tree socially and financially.

Now they have found a belief system in gender identity politics which has successfully borrowed a ‘progressive’ cloak because it didn’t directly arise from religious conservatism (though it can fit in well with it- see Iran)

And so they don’t want to let go of it however irrational it is,because it offers a modern put-down to women and lesbians and gay men, and what’s more it is also the perfect men’s sexual access campaign to get in to previously forbidden public spaces with women and children, for any men who want to do that- which doesn’t require the woman to hold any belief system at all. It’s as much of a disaster for safeguarding as religious extremism would be too.

I'm imagining a scenario where transhumansim becomes even more of a thing; total detachment from the human body - aided by a kind of feminism which sees pregnancy and child-rearing as a burden to be endured, or at best avoided.

Then there will be babies incubated outside of the human body as some sort of solution. The erasure of women will continue until people get to grips with the fact that are differences between the sexes and learn to live with and accept that, and society can then accommodate those differnces in an equitable way.

Men are not our enemies. I don't think there are hordes of men actively searching for a method with which to oppress women.

A woman is an adult human female or she is nothing. Biology matters.

That women are often the mst vocal supporters of trans ideology suggests to me the kind of view of women's rights which seeks equality as sameness; which seeks to eliminate all differnce in favour of convergence along the established model of full time workers outside of the home; with children in full time state care, or else women not having children at all.

But even then sexed differneces will remain. Men, as a group, are driven in different ways to women as a group, I suggest. Until you get rid of human biology that will always be the case. Personally, I see transhumanism as a dystopian scenario, not as a liberating one.

I don't support Trans ideology, the exact opposite.

But this is a thread about the Tories and Rishi Sunak breaking his promises.

& on this i firmly believe the Tories don't give a flying xxxx about women, the public services we need, the sports we play or the children we bring into the world, they had 13 years to show us differently.

Will Labour be any better? i believe so (on public services) but atm the signs on the Trans side of things are not looking good.

The majority of men don’t gain benefit nor want this, or it’s not on their radar. They are also not as impacted by females in their sports or spaces, should females feel safe enough to want to do so

It’s the tiny minority of men who are pushing for access and some men but also plenty of women support them