UK General Election Issues

1 - Sex and 'Gender'

Many voters are puzzled why politicians are sometimes asked questions such as ‘can a woman have a penis?’. It’s a simple question, with a simple answer (no, if anyone is unsure). But when politicians answer yes or obfuscate, as many do, it’s clear that their connection to reality is tenuous. They have swallowed some aspect of gender ideology, and believe (or have been bullied into saying) either that it is possible for humans to change sex or that humans have a ‘gender identity’ that is separate from their sex. Accepting such a belief, those politicians go on to argue that men should be able to access women-only spaces (changing rooms, refuges, prisons), that they can participate and compete in sports as if they were women, etc. And they often support harmful medical interventions for vulnerable children who feel uncomfortable about their bodies.

“It sounds like a story

‘bout someone seeking glory

But I swear to you this shit is real”

(Whistle the Band, Did You Know, 2024)

Skirt Go Spinny’s  YouTube video of Whistle’s Did You Know is well worth a listen/watch for anyone who hasn’t clocked the extent to which acceptance of gender ideology has eroded women’s rights and threatened the safeguarding of children.

The impact goes even deeper than that. Policies that pretend imagined ‘gender identities’ are real promote body modification, a boundary violation that is profitable for corporations. It’s just one of many boundary violations that corporations see as profit opportunities. Boundaries between humans and machines, and between humans and other species, are already under attack, as are planetary boundaries that protect climate stability and biodiversity. Accepting a politics that endorses lies about sex and ‘gender’ leads on to consequences that are far reaching.

The main political parties fighting this year’s general election in the UK don’t often draw attention to ‘gender’,  but three issues from the last few years have not disappeared - reform of the Gender Recognition Act, banning of conversion therapy, and the definition of sex.

• Gender Recognition Act reform

The Gender Recognition Act (GRA), introduced by a Labour government in 2004 with cross-party support, legalised sex falsification. It allows individuals who believe they have a ‘gender’ different from their sex, and have this belief affirmed by two doctors, to be issued with a gender recognition certificate and a falsified birth record. This enables them to be treated in law, for most circumstances, as if they were the opposite sex. In 2018 the Conservative Government consulted on a reform that would enable any adult who said they self-identified as the opposite sex to obtain these false ID documents, without the need for medical diagnosis. Following determined opposition from women’s groups and the LGB Alliance, the proposed reform was ditched in 2020. A subsequent proposal by the Scottish Government to introduce self-declaration in Scotland was blocked by the UK government.

• Conversion therapy ban

The Conservative Government promised in 2018 to ban ‘conversion practices’ aimed at changing sexual orientation or ‘gender identity’.  Most people understand conversion practices as the coercive attempt to change the sexual orientation of gay men and lesbians. There is no evidence that such ‘therapy’ is effective, and, thankfully, little evidence that it has actually been practiced in the UK for some time. But what was behind the proposed legislation had little to do with sexual orientation. It was aimed instead at banning talking therapies for children who experience unhappiness with their sexed bodies. Such a ban would be hugely problematic, because most of those children, if given help to accept the body changes of puberty, would grow into well-adjusted (and predominantly lesbian or gay) adults. Barring therapeutic help for such children would be in the interests of the gender industry, not the child. It would propel the children onto a pathway of lifelong medicalisation, and it would ‘trans the gay away’ - a new form of actual gay conversion.

• Definition of sex

Sex is a protected characteristic in the 2010 Equality Act, allowing organisations to provide single-sex services. Over the years, many organisations, following lobbying by Stonewall, have re-interpreted sex as gender, allowing men who say they are women to enter women-only spaces and compete in women’s sports. One women’s organisation, Sex Matters, has called for an amendment to the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biology, even though in reality it is ‘gender’ whose meaning is unclear.

Who to vote for

Finding someone to vote for who does not subscribe to gender ideology won’t be easy. Kellie-Jay Keen summed up the available choice in her inimitable style:  “Labour, shit. Conservatives, shit. Liberal Democrats, laughably shit” And, she added, “the Greens, insanely, end-of-the-world kind of shit.” (X, 22 May 2024).

There are limits to what our votes can achieve. But exposing the shit will be the first step in cleaning it up. All of us can play our part by asking candidates where they stand on the ‘gender’ issue.

Green and Liberal Democrat

As a long-standing Green voter, and one time party member, I recognise more than a grain of truth in KJK’s assessment of what was once my political ‘home’. I used to support the Green Party because it took the climate crisis more seriously than the other parties. It was some time before I noticed how many of their policies were determined by activists more interested in promoting ‘trans rights’ than addressing the climate emergency. It’s not just that entryists have climbed to positions of power within the party, they have used that power to discipline or suspend anyone who challenges gender ideology,

I’m not sure KJK was being entirely fair, though, in suggesting that the Greens are worse than the Liberal Democrats on this issue. After all, safeguarding red flag Aimee Challenor left the Greens for the Liberal Democrats because he felt they were less ‘transphobic’. And in my constituency at the last general election, the Green and Liberal Democrat candidates competed with each other as to who could be more dismissive of the need to protect single-sex spaces  (this year, the Labour candidate appears to be joining the competition).

True to form, the Liberal Democrat manifesto announces that the party will defend the rights of “all gender identities, including trans and non-binary people”, and that it will “reform the gender recognition process to remove the requirement for medical reports, recognise non-binary identities in law, and remove the spousal veto.”  (The ‘spousal veto’ is not a veto, but a pause to give a wife time to consider her options if her husband applies for a gender recognition certificate). Liberal Democrat policy would deny the rights of vulnerable women to refuse intimate care from men, undermining the excellent proposals elsewhere in their manifesto giving greater value to care and carers. The manifesto also ignores the recommendations of the Cass Report that children experiencing gender distress should be supported by psychological therapies, stating instead that Liberal Democrats would “ban all forms of conversion therapies and practices.”

The manifesto of the Green Party of England and Wales is slightly more explicit than the Liberal Democrat manifesto. It makes clear that its support for GRA reform involves self-declaration, and that its opposition to the ‘spousal veto’ removes rights from married women. It also states that sex education in schools must include “LGBTQIA+ content and resources”, though it omits to mention that much of that material is outsourced to organisations committed to gender ideology and encourages children to believe that they can be born in the wrong body.

Labour and Conservative

One aim of the GRA was to allow two individuals of the same sex to be married to each other.  It was not until 2013 that the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition government legalised same sex marriage. Both Labour and the Conservatives, instead of recognising that one of their reasons for introducing the GRA no longer applied, went on to become enthusiastic advocates of GRA reform, to allow gender self-declaration. This would enable individuals who claimed to be the opposite sex to be treated in law as if that actually was the case, without the (minimal) checks required by the original GRA.

Several women’s groups campaigned against GRA reform, recognising that it would have damaging consequences for women, particularly in refuges and prisons. Hardly any Labour MPs stood up for women’s rights. The rest kept quiet or followed the leadership in supporting removal of women's rights to single-sex spaces. Statements from many potential Labour cabinet ministers included David Lammy calling objectors to men in women’s spaces “dinosaurs who want to hoard rights”, and Lisa Nandy saying that a child rapist who said he ‘identified as a woman’ should be housed in a women’s jail. (David Lammy, incidentally, was the Minister who steered the GRA through parliament in 2004). As recently as April last year, Keir Starmer thought he was acknowledging reality when he said that “99.9% of women don’t have a penis”.  Three months later, he finally acknowledged that  “a woman is an adult human female”, though many doubt he will be able to resist pressure from his party’s trans activists if he becomes Prime Minister.

Faced with this level of betrayal, some longstanding Labour voters have indicated they might vote Conservative for the first time in their lives. The problem with this is that although some prominent Conservatives are critical of gender ideology, it was a Conservative government that had allowed numerous public institutions to become captured by ‘trans’ ideologues, and had instigated the 2018  proposals to reform the GRA to allow self-identification.

Early this month, Kemi Badenoch, as Minister for Women and Equalities, called for the Equality Act 2010  to be amended, to clarify that the protected characteristic of sex in the Act referred to ‘biological sex’ not ‘legal sex’. Labour’s dismissive response played into Conservative hands. But Badenoch’s proposal, far from resolving a legal confusion, intensifies it by introducing the notion of ‘legal sex’. The legal fiction created in the 2004 GRA is not a variety of sex, and sex does not need the qualifier biological. To suggest that there are two different categories of sex, legal and biological, can only reinforce those who want to reinterpret sex as ‘gender’.

The Conservative manifesto promises to “ protect female-only spaces and competitiveness in sport by making it clear that sex means biological sex in the Equality Act.” It doesn’t refer to Badenoch’s category of ‘legal sex’, but it emphasises that “it is right that we have in place provisions and protections for those whose sense of self does not match their biological sex.” Only repeal of the GRA, an end to the falsification of ID documents, and removal of the gender reassignment protected characteristic, will clear up the confusions of the Equality Act. This is not on the agenda of any of the main parties.

The Conservative manifesto reiterates that “attempts at so-called ‘conversion therapy’ are abhorrent.” It does appear to acknowledge, though, that legislation that is ‘trans inclusive’ poses problems - “In light of the Cass Review Final Report, it is right that we take more time before reaching a final judgement on additional legislation in this area.”

If, as seems likely, the Conservatives lose the election, and Rishi Sunak resigns leadership of the party, much will depend on who will become the new leader. The current favourite, if she is re-elected, is Penny Mordaunt. As Minister for Women and Equalities in 2018, Mordaunt enthusiastically denied biological reality in order to promote gender self-identification, then later lied that she had done this.  As Paymaster General in 2021, in a parliamentary debate about whether expectant mothers should be called ‘pregnant people’, she intoned the familiar slogan “transmen are men and transwomen are women.” A Conservative opposition under her leadership would almost certainly support gender self-identification.

Labour’s manifesto claims that “women’s equality will be at the heart of our missions”, but it fails to make clear how it defines women. This makes it impossible to know what it means when it says it will retain the Equality Act’s single-sex protections. Labour thinks it has found an acceptable  compromise on GRA reform, by requiring only one doctor, instead of two, to support an application for falsified ID.  On conversion therapy, it says it wants “freedom for people to explore their gender identity”,  yet it is determined to deliver a “full trans-inclusive ban’’ on therapeutic support. It clearly believes its ambiguity will defuse conflict, and allow its support for the gender industry to march on unchallenged.

Other parties

There are 63 different political parties that are fielding more than one candidate in this election, and it would be impossible to cover them all. I shall concentrate on the three that are standing in my constituency, and on one that is not, but which I would consider voting for if it was.

Reform UK’s draft ‘Contract With The People’ states that “Public toilets and changing areas must provide single-sex facilities”, and that “social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology should have no role in regulating free speech.’” These bald statements are all that is offered on ‘gender’, and suggest the party has little idea of the scope of the problem. In my constituency, a property developer and strip club founder was going to stand for Reform UK, but withdrew when he realised that his dubious business practices would come under scrutiny. The party’s acceptance of his candidacy suggests that its support for ‘single-sex facilities’ may not mean what we are supposed to think it means. He was only replaced at the last minute.

There is also a candidate in my constituency for UKIP ( the UK Independence Party, a predecessor of Reform UK). UKIP’s manifesto (mysteriously removed from its website half way through the election campaign) revealed confused thinking about ‘gender’.  It acknowledged that “there is no such thing as gender, only biological sex”, yet went on to suggest that surgery can change sex, so that men who have undergone ‘gender reassignment surgery’ can access women’s spaces. And its support for “the traditional concept of marriage and the family unit” included advocating the commodification of women’s bodies, insisting that “surrogacy has an important role to play in our society.”

The manifesto of The Workers Party of Britain criticises the “malign alliance that has emerged between an increasingly unhinged identity politics and the neo-liberal elite where Frankenstein’s monster (identity politics) now partially controls its former master (capitalism)” This would be an interesting if jargon- ridden take on the recent emergence of the gender industry, but the manifesto does not reveal what it is referring to. George Galloway, the party’s leader, objects to children being taught that there are many genders, but the fact that he repeatedly says that gay relationships are “not normal”, and that abortion rights for women should be restricted, doesn’t inspire confidence in this party’s stand on women’s rights and gay rights.

Unlike the other parties, the Party of Women (POW), founded by Kelly-Jay Keen, is unashamedly single issue, focused on women’s rights and specifically on the need to repeal the GRA and remove the Equality Act’s protected characteristic of gender reassignment. Its aim is not to acquire MPs, but to use the opportunities of an election campaign to get the issue aired, changing the conversation around ‘gender’ and ending the silencing of women. POW candidates are standing in sixteen English constituencies, and their manifesto is succinct:

No woman has a penis

No man has a vagina

There is no such thing as ‘non-binary’

And ‘transitioning’ children is abuse

The Party of Women might have got my vote if it was standing in my constituency. But it’s not. I cannot in all conscience vote for a candidate who denies biological reality, or one who minimises the reality of climate change. Now I’ve seen who is actually standing in my constituency I shall probably be spoiling my ballot paper, for the first time in 58 years of voting in general elections. This may be a futile, individualist gesture. But I cannot discard my hard won right to vote, any more than I can vote to deny reality.

Part 2 of UK General Election Issues will be on Climate and Nature.