Karen Ingala Smith on Sarah Owens WH interview
When asked what a woman is, Owen for some reason found herself unable to answer the question. Instead, she said ‘somebody that is going to be paid less than their male counterparts, somebody that is going to be less safe walking down the streets and somebody that faces more barriers in the workplace, education and health sector. These are not examples of what a woman is, they are examples of sex-inequality. They are examples of how the sex-hierarchy operates in patriarchal societies. Indeed, they are issues that we might suppose fall within the remit of the WESC. If we managed to eradicate all these examples of sex inequality, the biological category of women would still exist. But we need to be able to identify women if we are to show how we are discriminated against.
I was surprised to hear Owen say that most of the debate around the clash between women’s sex-based rights and protections had happened without ‘transwomen’s’ voices. Perhaps she hasn’t read the 2016 WESC Transgender Equality Report. I opened my book with a reference to this report. It included the nonsense claim that each of us is assigned sex at birth and quoted a newspaper article citing the disputed ‘sobering and distressing fact that in UK surveys of trans people about half of young people and a third of adults report that they have attempted suicide’. The report included quotes from the Scottish Transgender Alliance recommending the removal of the single-sex exceptions, from Galop, an LGBT anti-abuse charity, which claimed that transgender people are currently at serious risk of harm by being excluded from such services sexual and domestic violence and abuse services and one Mridul Wadhwa, who is quoted saying: ‘I am disappointed to think that someone has the right to refuse work to me and others like me in my sector [the sexual and domestic violence and abuse sector] just because they think that I might not be a woman.’ And we all know how his appointment turned out, don’t we?
Far from the voices of trans identified males not having been heard, the government announced that the Gender Recognition Act was to be reviewed following recommendations of the WESC report. The committee, then chaired by Maria Miller MP, had called 20 people (outside of MPs) as witnesses to the inquiry which preceded the report. Kathleen Stock summarised those who were called as witnesses thus: eleven of the twenty represented trans activist organisations, while the remaining nine were relatively neutral experts, though some of these were also trans themselves. No women’s groups were called to give evidence, though some had made written submissions, and neither was anyone who had voiced concerns about transitioning. In fact, one of the reasons that Woman’s Place UK was founded in 2017 was to help ensure that women’s voices were heard – as it was ours, not those of males who identified as transgender or organisations servicing their interests, which had been excluded.
Perhaps it is understandable that the day after her appointment as Chair was announced, Owen was not familiar with the history of the committee, including the highly significant report that it had published eight years earlier. But this gap in her knowledge should not have resulted in her making a claim which was quite the opposite of the history of the committee that she now chairs. It hardly suggests that she is capable of hearing women’s concerns or recognising when we are not heard by others. And, I’d add, the ‘say what you want to think is true because it suits your narrative regardless of its basis in fact’ is entirely consistent with the input of transgender identity ideology advocates: their false claims about suicide, denial of the harms of puberty blockers, denial of the extent of the medicalisation and sterilisation of minors, exaggeration of the levels of serious harm and violence to persons with transgender identities in the UK and so on.
These are just bits I picked out. The whole article can be read at https://kareningalasmith.com/2024/09/12/sarah-owen-mp-newly-elected-chair-of-the-women-and-equalities-select-committee-on-womans-hour/