Transgender Equality debate in the House of Commons
By Ruth Huldah:
This Thursday morning 1 December 2016 there will be a debate on Transgender Equality in the House of Commons.
The government’s response to the Transgender Equality Inquiry conducted in 2015-2016 by the Women and Equalities Committee will be debated. The debate is billed as a Backbenchers’ Debate on the Parliament website, having been brought forward by the Backbench Business Committee following representations by Maria Miller, Ruth Cadbury and Angela Crawley. The Women and Equalities Committee report on Transgender Equality made over 30 recommendations to changes in public policy including changing the Equality Act 2010 so that ‘gender reassignment’ as a protected characteristic is changed to ‘gender identity’.
The documents from the inquiry, including the Government’s Response published in 7 June 2016, can be viewed here.
It is well-known by now that there is serious concern about the threat that promoting transgender and ‘gender identity’ (terminology in this area is constantly changing) poses to fair treatment of women.
The serious danger of including ‘gender identity’ in the Equality Act to women and girls as the female sex.
Recommendations 4, 5 and 10 by the Minister for Women and Equalities and the Government and Equalities Office regarding the Transgender Equality Inquiry 2015-2016 are that the Equality Act 2010 should be changed such that ‘gender reassignment’ is replaced by ‘gender identity’. Such a move would consolidate ‘gender’ as a purely legal category, allowing men to declare themselves women at their own say-so without having undergone hormonal and surgical treatment. This would be very dangerous given that there is already international evidence of some male-to-female transgender people of malicious intent taking advantage of lax laws on ‘gender’ to enter women-only spaces such as public toilets, domestic violence shelters, etc. Already there are numerous blogs online, often authored anonymously by women, devoted to tracking these problems and concerned about the increasing tendency for public policy in western countries to use the term ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex’.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom, and wider social damage
It is undeniable that the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Public Sector Equality Duty following on from the Equality Act 2010 has meant that reliable critical analysis in social research and higher education on difficult issues around transgender identity is not being conducted for fear of being considered ‘offensive’ or even ‘transphobic’ and therefore ‘hate speech’.
The problem with inserting ‘gender identity’ in the Equality Act is that a deep shift would be made in people’s understanding of themselves as human beings, whereby thoughts and ideas about themselves (often rooted in fetish) would take precedence over the reality of being embodied as male or female. This would not be good for mental health or public order and safety.
The current Gender Identity Bill C-16 currently under scrutiny in the Canadian Senate is a warning sign of things to come should some in Parliament and in the transgender activist community get their way. The hounding of the academic psychologist Jordan B. Peterson at the University of Toronto should serve as a warning for the UK of the serious threat to free speech from any proposal to encode the category of ‘gender identity’ into law. Once ‘gender identity’ would be enshrined in UK law it would be included in the Public Sector Equality Duty, making free, open debate and truly critical analysis of all matters regarding ‘gender’ impossible. Freedom of speech and academic freedom would be fatally compromised, possibly precipitating a ‘brain drain’. This would result in a decline in public trust in government, official statistics and state institutions, at a time when trust is desperately needed and voter turnout is low.
The Ministry of Justice report on transgender prisoners, November 2016
On 9 November the Ministry of Justice published a report, ‘Review of the Care and Management of Transgender Prisoners’. The report was written with the help of two campaign groups, the Prison Reform Trust and Gendered Intelligence, a transgender lobby group for young trans people, who responded to the Transgender Equality Inquiry.
This report recommends that transgender prisoners be sent to the prison of their chosen gender. It uses the terms ‘gender identity’ and ‘non-binary’ alongside ‘transgender’ to refer to prisoners who would undoubtedly be mostly male. The report’s use of these terms inevitably means that the current situation will continue:
1) More male-to-female transgender offenders will be sent to women’s prisons
2) Such prisoners being counted among female offenders therefore giving the dishonest impression that actual women are committing more offences than they are
3) Already some male-to-female sex offenders have not been sent to prison despite being convicted because judges fear they would be assaulted in men’s prisons
Due to the absence of reliable official statistics on transgender offenders it is not possible to check the correctness of statements such as:
‘Any assessment of a transgender offender’s risk of reoffending should be based on valid, evidenced factors that relate to that individual, as for any other offender. We have seen no evidence that being transgender is in itself linked to risk. Risk assessments must be free from assumptions or stereotyping’ (p. 6).
Yet there are in fact numerous newspaper reports of court cases of transgender sex offenders reoffending against women and children.
The report stipulates that ‘all NOMS staff should understand the rights of all transgender and non-binary people, and not just those undergoing gender reassignment, through training and e-learning’ (p. 7).
The report recommends that ‘an Advisory Group on transgender people in custody or subject to community supervision should be established, initially for three years. The terms of reference will explicitly include transgender people’s safety and high-level monitoring of allocation and transfer processes. The Group will include, among others, representatives from transgender advocacy groups, NHS and clinical experts, youth justice, inspecting and scrutiny bodies, and offender management practice experts’ (p. 8).
There is no mention at all of women’s groups being represented. This is completely unacceptable.
All attempts by government and lobby groups to amend the Equality Act such that ‘gender identity’ becomes a protected characteristic must be strongly resisted for the sake of the entire population of the United Kingdom.
Ruth Huldah (a pseudonym) is a theologican and researcher.
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