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

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I too welcome this debate. It is an honour for me to speak after so many excellent speeches.

In the 1980s, I worked in financial services and was confronted by a world dominated by men, many of whom saw the arrival of women as a threat. Molestation and abuse were common. My promotion was once delayed because I refused to submit to my boss’s sexual advances. There was no point in complaining; if you wanted to succeed in a man’s world, you just had to put up with it. Today, this kind of behaviour is unacceptable—illegal, even. It has been a long struggle but it is not over yet. As many noble Lords have mentioned, misogyny still exists, but we women should be proud of what we have achieved in just over a generation.

I am also proud of the Conservative Party: we have provided two women Prime Ministers and, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin noted, of the six remaining candidates for the party leadership, four are women. However, this is no time to celebrate. No sooner had we demolished the barriers of misogyny, then others sprang up in their place. These are far more dangerous; they are based on bigotry and ignorance, and they send women’s rights back to the Dark Ages.

The fanatics of gender politics have perverted a worthy campaign to give transgender people the protection of the law; it is now a demented ideology which denies the reality of biological sex. It is now enough for a man to say that he feels like a woman to be treated as a woman, despite the plain fact that he is still a man. In just 10 years, gender ideology has infected a whole range of public and private institutions. It is playing havoc with our pronouns and grammar, and it invents words to give itself a veneer of pseudoscience. It despises feminism and even has homophobic undertones. It is no wonder that President Putin used JK Rowling’s battle with the trans fanatics to highlight the decadence of the world.

Women have been shocked to discover that what they thought were safe places—toilets, gyms, hospital wards, prisons and the like—now admit men with fully intact male genitalia claiming to be trans women. Free speech is damaged; the no-platforming of countless people who challenge trans identity is an offence to democratic values. I therefore warmly welcome the Government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.

Most dangerous of all, the teaching of gender fluidity to pre-adolescent children can do harm for life. There are charities that encourage sex change treatments for children involving hormone blockers and mastectomies. Take the example of Keira Bell: by the age of 20, she had had her breasts removed and the treatments she took for years had given her body hair, a beard and a low voice, and had impacted her sexual functions—and none of it has helped her. The court ruled in her case that it was doubtful that children could be given informed consent to treatments which might affect the rest of their lives. I go further and say that it is child abuse, plain and simple; it is scandalous.

To be clear, I stand before noble Lords not as a womb carrier, a birthing person, a chest feeder, a cervix owner or an adult human, but as a woman and a mother. Can the Minister reassure this House that the Government will update the Equality Act 2010 with clear, biologically sound definitions of “men”, “women”, “sex” and “gender”? At the very least, this will help some bishops with their predicament.