A new alliance against the transgender police

The day after a Commons debate to protect women from sexual harassment at Westminster, 50 people met in a Commons Committee room on October 31st with the same object: to protect women, in this case by resisting Government proposals announced in the summer by Justine Greening to allow people to self-identify as a different gender. These go back to the recommendations in the 2015 report by the Women and Equalities Committee, chaired by Maria Miller.

David Davies, Conservative MP for Monmouth,who has been alarmed by these proposals, had convened the meeting. He read out the list of transgender activist groups who’d provided the bulk of evidence to Ms Miller’s committee. Yet no representations had been heard from the other side of the argument, he said. Ms Miller had been quoted as saying that people with such views were bigoted and their opinions had no validity.

Given the difficulty of balancing women’s rights with transgender rights, it was perhaps not surprising that his meeting was so well attended – not just by MPs from both sides of the House, but by women’s groups and journalists from the leading papers; or that two thirds of those present were women.

Caroline Flint MP, a Labour minister from 2005 to 2009, spoke of the emerging environment of competing rights in which women were on the losing end. Miranda Yardley, herself a transsexual, pointed out: ‘The endowment of rights to males as females compromises the privacy of females . . . and particularly will affect those women who are economically disadvantaged or victims of male violence.’

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