Women and Girls: Economic Well-being, Welfare, Safety and Opportunities

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, very much indeed for giving us this opportunity to discuss a wide range of women’s and girl’s rights. I will touch on the welfare and safety of women. I am aware that the Minister will not be able to answer my rather detailed questions, and so I seek a meeting with her, and perhaps with other noble Baronesses, to discuss the topics that I raise.

My concern is that, on welfare and safety, we have gone backwards for the most vulnerable people. To refer to a statement made yesterday by Safe Schools Alliance, the introduction of graphic or extreme sexual material in sex education lessons reinforces the porn culture that is damaging our children in such a devastating way. That came from the Children’s Commissioner. I would add to that that it is extremely damaging to have, for example, a mentally handicapped boy in school being asked to understand and to agree that the man in front of him is in fact a woman.

All that rests on a misapprehension that you can change your sex. As the noble Lord, Lord Winston, declared only yesterday on the Piers Morgan show, as reported in today’s Daily Mail,

“you can’t change your sex”.

And as Kellie-Jay Keen, another woman activist of great eminence, remarked, that is the “perfect headline”. Indeed, I suggest to the right reverend Prelate that that is rather useful for the Church of England, as it will be able to define a woman today, whereas it could not the day before. I will ask the Church to do so as soon as possible.

When we look at health boards, we see that the rights of women and children have gone back again. The approach to single-sex wards makes meaningless that name when one invites transgender people who are men who declare as women to take spaces in female-sex wards and then defines them in the records as women, it is no wonder that one cannot find the evidence of sexual assaults that I have mentioned in this Chamber before. I have that evidence, but the hospitals concerned have been informed by their trusts that if a man says he is a woman, he is woman and he goes down on that record, so it is not unlikely that the ministry cannot find those references. I am very sad to say that denial of sexual assaults goes as far as declaring “Remove the complainant from the hospital ward”. This is completely unacceptable; it is a wrong identity, and it degrades the woman disgracefully. As the noble Lord, Lord Winston, says, you cannot change your sex.

This is affecting speech-impaired and paralysed patients. As Transgender Trend has remarked, sex-based rights are effectively under threat; I would say that they have been destroyed. Let us take the case of a 16 year-old girl, reported only yesterday. She is severely learning-disabled, autistic—therefore non-verbal—and entirely dependent on others for what is now known as “intimate care”. It is scandalous that the special needs place in which she is resident has removed “cross-gender consent from personal and intimate care policy”. I have an earlier case of this—I had thought it was a once-off—in a school in Surrey. It is no longer a once-off: I understand that 50% of local authorities have adopted that position. To be blunt, this means that behind the closed doors of a lavatory, male members of staff, without any necessary qualification, with no consent from the parents of the patient and with the patient unable to agree, can dress, undress, use tampons—I apologise, but I have to be accurate—and indulge themselves, if they so wish, with female genitalia. These are girls and woman who cannot object and cannot consent. I would suggest that there are plenty of female carers around. There are threats of rape. The Brent HIV case of a couple of years ago, involving a girl called Cassie, shows that this is no figment of the imagination; there are actual evidenced cases. Health boards’ approaches to single sex make such cases seem meaningless—“remove the complainant”—and sexual assaults are happening.

JK Rowling, our most eminent and wonderful author, with whom I have worked for acutely disabled children in eastern Europe either side of the same bed, calls it “this horror show”, whereas an NHS professional who works with patients who cannot move or speak declares it intentional cruelty. I believe it is illegal, because it is against the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and the Act of 2014. I beg the Minister to allow me a meeting.