International Women’s Day

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Lampard on her excellent speech and welcome her to this House.

The last time I participated in a debate on International Women’s Day, I spoke about my personal experience of working in financial services in the 1980s and how I was confronted with sexual harassment, molestation and abuse. The view then was that, if you wanted to make it in a man’s world, you had to pay the price and shut up. Thankfully, today in the UK, that kind of behaviour is considered totally unacceptable, even illegal. The view that only men can succeed in politics, business or the arts is no longer acceptable. We have moved a long way in one generation.

The challenge today is to get the balance right and not let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. We should not condemn femininity, nor should we emasculate men. We should not wage a war between the sexes. Above all, we should not fall into an ideological split between true feminists, of which there are many in this House, and groups that promote extreme ideologies to the detriment of women’s rights. Woman should be allowed to identify themselves as women; allowed to speak without fear of being cancelled; and allowed to have their own space and privacy. Unless we women rise up against these belligerent gender-based ideologies, we will reverse all the hard-fought progress that we have achieved since the 1960s, while the next generation will find themselves more confused and constrained than our parents ever were.

This is why I am deeply concerned at what is being taught in schools, where external lobby groups have been allowed to disseminate inappropriate teaching materials to promote their belief that gender identity is a fact. Of course, teaching children about the lives, experiences and rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people is welcome; it will help them to understand sexuality in a non-judgmental manner and develop empathy for people from different backgrounds and with different beliefs. However, this is far removed from teaching children that there are 100 genders, and that they may have been born in the wrong body; and encouraging them to believe that changing their gender could be the solution to their problems and anxieties. This is moving from the factual to the ideological. Sex is binary and immutable; encouraging children to believe otherwise is unscientific and dangerous.

Girls often reject womanhood as they start to go through puberty; this is an understandable reaction to their bodies changing and to society’s expectations of what a woman should be. When I lived with my parents in Africa, I had short hair, climbed trees and played with Dinky Toys; that tells noble Lords my age. I wanted to be a boy; I behaved like a boy. This was a phase of my development into who I am today. Not all girls who prefer male pursuits when they are young are trans.

Propagating ideologies that are not based on facts and indoctrinating children reminds me of the Soviet Union. This gender ideology plays straight into the hands of Mr Putin, who accuses the West of moving towards Stalinism—that is a funny comment from him—and

“teaching sexual deviation to children”.

As he explains,

“we’re fighting to protect our children and our grandchildren from this experiment to change their souls … The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.”

Thank goodness for Miriam Cates, who is calling for an urgent inquiry into what is being taught in schools. Will my noble friend the Minister urgently review the material used at school? Will she also press for RSE lessons to be truly age-appropriate? Does she not agree that talking about sexual desires with adults is not only embarrassing for children but is a clear safeguarding red flag?

While we are talking here about our rights, we must remember all the Ukrainian women and children who, at this moment, do not have that privilege. Their concern is survival. Their wish is to end the war, to end the devastation of their country and to survive.