Legislative Definition of Sex

Anna Firth Excerpts

Monday 12th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I rise to support the first petition to make the Equality Act clear, but I want to use my short time this afternoon to focus on the importance of protecting single-sex spaces and services.

I might be going back to the beginning, but, after such a long debate, that is not a bad thing. I want to begin by saying that people who are transgender must be supported to play a full part in society and public life. They should not be harassed or discriminated against. We in this place must be very careful not to stoke hatred of any kind towards them or any other section of society.

However, this debate is not about trans people or, more formally, people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. Their rights remain, quite properly, protected and unchanged. The issue is whether the 6,000 or so trans people who have a gender recognition certificate count for the purposes of equality and sex discrimination law as members of their own sex or of the opposite sex. Clarifying the Equality Act as suggested would make it clear that having a gender recognition certificate does not give male people the right to compete in women’s sports, undress or shower with women and girls, or be employed in a job that involves intimate contact with women, such as the example so very well described by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer), in hospitals or women’s prisons.

Families, women and children in Southend West want to know that when the sign on the door says or indicates female, that is not up for negotiation. The only people who should be in that space are biological women. Biological males or trans women or non-binary people should simply not be in those spaces.

Like the common law, legislation regarding equalities and sex discrimination has evolved over time and it can be very complicated, but what we are talking about this afternoon is a very simple clarification. When we talk about sex discrimination in the Equality Act, we are talking about biological sex—nothing more and nothing less. We know that it is important that the law is clarified because we know there are exceptions throughout the Equality Act that allow for single-sex services, including, as we have talked about, specialist services such as women’s refuges, women’s prisons, women’s health services, and also everyday services such as public toilets and showers at gyms.

As well as making it clear that where the Equality Act refers to sex, that means biological sex, we must also be clear that the definition of a woman is someone who was born female and the definition of a man is someone who was born male. Of course people should be able to express themselves, but the simple fact is that someone who was born male, if they gain a gender recognition certificate, is not the same as someone who was born female, and they should not be accessing as of right female-only spaces and services.

Quite simply, as has already been said, if the Equality Act is not clarified, it will be impossible for service providers to exclude a biological male with a gender recognition certificate from any female space or specialist service. “Case by case” simply does not work. Operating without clear rules simply shifts the responsibility to service providers to make very difficult decisions about who should have access to female-only spaces and services, and who should not. A simple search on the internet reveals the extent of the confusion that reigns. To give just one example, the NHS promises single-sex accommodation in hospitals, yet NHS England’s annex B policy tells hospitals to allow trans and non-binary people to choose whether they are housed with men or women.

The situation is simply not clear. It is said that sporting bodies set sex-based rules, so clarification is not needed. I would say the exact opposite: the law must be clear about sex if sporting bodies are to feel confident setting sex-based rules.

I see that I am about to run out of time. I end by saying that recently I was horrified by the story of the fight between the boxer Fallon Fox, who identifies as a trans woman, and Tamikka Brents. Fox hit Brents so hard that she suffered from a concussion and a fractured skull, and received seven staples to her head. Purely and simply, that was a man fighting a woman. I do not believe that that is right or fair, and I do not want to see that happening in this country.

[Sir George Howarth (in the Chair)]

I call the SNP spokesperson.