Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Cashman Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

Any male who wishes to transition is free to do so. In a tolerant society I would expect our approach to be, “Wear what you want, change your names and pronouns as you like and, of course, express your gender identity”. However, none of this changes someone’s sex, and people should not have expectations of the same rights as women. If any trans prisoners are mistreated in the male estate, prison authorities should punish perpetrators and protect the victims, of course. But we need to untangle this humane response from the often-bullying demand that we deny biological reality or that the rights of transgender women can be used to sideline women’s rights to single-sex provision—an important and hard-fought-for right which I as a woman am not prepared to sell out just for political expediency or because it is unpopular. If necessary, special provision should be made for transgender prisoners, of course, and maybe the details, as people have described them, are not what one would want. However, an attempt at resolving this in a humane way is why this amendment is so important. It is a practical and pragmatic solution for transgender prisoners who feel unsafe on the male estate, but it does not force women to give up their rights, or compromise women and same-sex provision on the women’s estate.

[Lord Cashman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to speak against this amendment. We should remind ourselves that when we talk about trans women and trans men, we are talking about men and women who have faced very difficult choices about their identity and whom they believe themselves to be. Once they face that choice and make the decision, the transition is a very lengthy process and, again, it is not undertaken lightly because, as we have heard, so often it leads to gender reassignment.

I occasionally go on Twitter. I have read the tweets and received messages from people who, in relation to what we are discussing tonight, have said that if they thought that they were going to prison as a trans woman or a trans man, they would rather commit suicide than face what they believe would be inhumane treatment within the United Kingdom Prison Service. We have to deal with these fears. We are being asked to deal with fears on both sides of this argument, and I want us to deal with both equally. The balancing of rights always poses for us the greatest problem, but I believe that the Ministry of Justice, in its policy on assessing trans prisoners, has got it absolutely right.

It is late and we have other important work to do, so I will begin to wind up. But I wish to associate myself wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I could go through the policy section by section stating why I believe it is right. I am not going to do that, but if your Lordships wished to return to it, I would do so.

I will finish with these reflections. This amendment, even though it has been placed in good faith and, as the mover said, with good intention, deeply concerns me because it perpetrates the stereotype of trans women and trans men as sexual predators—as a threat to other women, and trans men as a threat to the wider society. It also, as was said in debate on the previous amendment, creates further inequalities; it does not reduce them.

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, and the first thing I want to say is that we are talking only about men who have not transitioned to women, which is quite different.

Although we have come a long way since the 2007 Corston report to improve conditions for women in prisons, we are now failing them. Indeed, something has recently gone badly wrong. Women prisoners have a right to the security of a single-sex space. By definition, women are deprived of this security if men are admitted to their prison, including trans women prisoners of male sex, whether or not they have the benefit of a GRC. By the same token, a women’s prison is no place for vulnerable at-risk males. Prison policy must provide for the protection of everybody, and this amendment makes that clear.

How then have we allowed prison policy to be captured by a concern for the protection of trans prisoners at the cost of imprisoned women’s most fundamental rights? There is no balance or fairness in that. The answer of course is that government departments have allowed themselves to be influenced, even intimidated, by noisy and modish pressure groups, whose wilful ignorance of basic science has all the features of a cult.

I have never visited or been to a prison, but as a woman I can imagine how it must be to be incarcerated and threatened. On this note, I very much support this amendment and thank my noble friends Lord Blencathra, Lord Farmer and Lord Cormack for tabling it.