International Women’s Day

Joanna Cherry Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

I start by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum), who gave us a very powerful and assured maiden speech and much food for thought. On International Women’s Day, we should think about what kind of country we women want to live in. I was reflecting on this when I realised, to my disappointment, that the Domestic Abuse Bill, which was recently reintroduced, will be yet another missed opportunity for the United Kingdom Government to finally do what is necessary to ratify the Istanbul convention. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin), who speaks for my party on women and equalities issues, said, our then colleague in the SNP Dr Eilidh Whiteford led a successful campaign in 2017 to pass a law requiring the UK Government to ratify the Istanbul convention. This was the first time that an SNP MP had managed to get a private Member’s Bill into law, and it is very sad that, three years later, the UK Government have yet to ratify the convention.

The Istanbul convention is based on the understanding that violence against women is a form of gender-based violence that is committed against women because they are women. The convention makes it clear that it is the obligation of the state to address it fully in all its forms, and to take measures to protect all women from violence, to protect victims and to prosecute perpetrators. The convention leaves no doubt that there can be no real equality between women and men if women experience gender-based violence on a large scale and state agencies and institutions do not do enough to stop it.

I raised the issue of the UK’s failure to ratify the Istanbul convention in the House of Commons last week. That was before the Domestic Abuse Bill was reintroduced. I asked whether it was the requirement to support migrant women experiencing domestic abuse that was holding things up. It seems, I am sorry to say, that it is. Migrant women often find it impossible to access emergency protection because of the no recourse to public funds condition, and they are highly vulnerable to domestic abuse, and to coercive control in that situation, as a result of their immigration status. I am pleased to see that the new Domestic Abuse Bill is going to address some of the remaining issues preventing us from ratifying the convention, such as extraterritorial effect, but it will still fall short in the key area of the provision of services for migrant women, and that is simply not good enough.

My colleagues in the Scottish Government have ensured the passage of all the necessary legislation to enable ratification in respect of devolved matters. Does anyone think that the Scottish Government, led by my colleague Nicola Sturgeon, would still be quibbling after all this time about extending services to highly vulnerable migrants? I think we all know that the answer to that question is no. Last year, on International Women’s Day, the Irish Government ratified the Istanbul convention. The UK is now one of only six EU—or, in our case, former EU—countries still to do so. I believe that the best thing the British Government could do to mark this International Women’s Day would be to ratify the convention. When does the Minister think that the Government will deal with the issue in relation to migrant women, and when will we be in a position to ratify?

Just last week, the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet—I hope I have pronounced that correctly—warned against complacency regarding women’s rights. She said that women’s rights

“cannot be an optional policy, subject to the changing winds of politics”.

When we look at the statistics right across the world, we can see that she is absolutely right about that. One in three women across the world experiences violence that is perpetrated by men. Between 60 million and 100 million women who should be alive today are missing, presumed dead, because of male violence. One woman dies every minute across the world due to problems relating to pregnancy, and 15 million adolescent girls have experienced forced sex. I am sure that we can multiply that figure several times for adult women. We also know that 72% of human trafficking victims are female, and that the vast majority, many of whom are children, are trafficked for the purposes of prostitution. Women also work two out of three of all labour hours worldwide, but they earn just 10% of the world’s income.

For all these reasons, women must be allowed to organise themselves to campaign against their oppression. Sometimes, this means excluding the group that has historically been responsible for the oppression of women, and that group is men. One of the things I want to say today, as forcefully as I can, is that it is eminently reasonable for women to organise on the basis of their sex, if they wish to do so. It is also legal for them to do so. It has been central to decades of feminist thought to say that gender is imposed on women in order to uphold their oppression. By gender, feminists mean presentation, modes of dress and the falsehood of masculine and feminine personality traits, about which we heard earlier. So if we say that gender is somehow innate, and that it supersedes sex, the logical conclusion is that women can somehow identify out of our oppression. Many feminists disagree with that, but increasingly, disagreeing with gender ideology has become a dangerous thing to do, as we heard from the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price). This brings me to the problem of no-platforming and the attempted silencing of well-respected feminist academics and others simply for asserting women’s rights. I would like this Chamber, on International Women’s Day, to send the really strong message across all the nations of these islands that no-platforming and attempting to silence feminist academics and other women who assert women’s rights is wrong.

Last weekend Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, found herself disinvited from making a short speech at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first women’s liberation movement meeting in the UK. That meeting had taken place at Ruskin College, as did last weekend’s conference. Professor Todd is a feminist and a socialist who has written extensively about women’s history and working-class history. Since 2017 she has been president of the Socialist Educational Association. The decision to silence her was not supported by the women who attended the conference, and thankfully it has been widely condemned, but she is one of a growing number of feminist academics who have been censored for their views that biological sex matters and that women, as a marginalised group, should be allowed to organise themselves according to their own definitions.

Professor Todd now requires security to attend her place of work. Sadly, she is not alone. Professor Rosa Freedman, an expert in human rights law who has worked for the UN and is now at the University of Reading, has suffered similar abuse. Naturally, because she is Jewish, she has also received antisemitic abuse for daring to be a feminist. The door of her office at the university has been vandalised and urinated on, and she has been followed home by individuals threatening rape and violence, simply for asserting women’s right to organise on the basis of their sex.

Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the philosophy professor Kathleen Stock has found herself de-platformed and subjected to a sustained campaign to have her ejected from her job at the University of Sussex. Prominent female politicians and journalists in my own country, Scotland, have been hounded and told that they should lose their jobs, simply for asserting women’s sex-based rights.

I had just a little taste of the treatment that some of those brave feminists have endured last year when, in the course of my duties on the Joint Committee on Human Rights—ironically, it was during an inquiry into freedom of speech—I raised with a Twitter executive Twitter’s one-sided practice of banning women and categorising as hate speech tweets stating biological facts, such as “women don’t have penises”, while tolerating and upholding abusive tweets threatening direct violence towards leading feminists such as Caroline Criado Perez and Helen Lewis. As a result of my intervention—not because I am special, but because I am a Member of Parliament and Twitter has to listen to people like me—those tweets were taken down and Twitter said that it would look again at its policy on hateful conduct, which does not include sex as a protected characteristic, which the Committee’s report commented was problematic.

The response to me doing my job in this House was an outpouring of bile on social media, culminating in a death threat, which Police Scotland and the Metropolitan police took seriously enough to give me police protection. Since then I have endured a daily stream of abuse on Twitter, including allegations that I am a transphobe and, ludicrously, a homophobe—it is quite difficult to be homophobic as a lesbian, but anyway. I am not remotely transphobic; I support the rights of trans people and have very good relationships with trans women in my constituency. I can tell the House that many trans women I speak to are angry that their quiet and dignified lives are being disrupted by malevolent individuals pushing identity politics in a way that is anti-democratic and abusive.

I am very proud of the fact that in Scotland we have very good rights-based protections for trans people. No one wants to change that, but some feminists have legitimate concerns about changing the law on gender recognition to allow self-identification. That is why I, along with a trans woman in my constituency, wrote to a colleague in the Scottish Government last year to suggest that the issue might be considered by a citizen’s assembly, in the way that Ireland has dealt with contentious issues. That is because my constituent and I think that refusing to acknowledge that legitimate concerns exist is not a solution to the current impasse in the debate on gender recognition, and nor is shouting down and targeting women. We must identify the issues, reflect and find ways of addressing them together.

Last year I found myself in the ludicrous situation of having to sue PinkNews for wrongly alleging that I was being investigated for homophobia. I am pleased to say that it settled out of court, and I donated the damages to a well-known lesbian and gay charity. Unfortunately, not all bullies are as easy to tackle. It is over time that every Member from every party in this House stood up to bullies in the gender lobby who want to shut down the right to free speech for those who do not 100% agree with their ideology.

Even if one does not care about this issue, if we allow bullies to triumph over free speech in one area of public discourse, we are giving them free rein to triumph over free speech in other areas of public discourse. I use the word “bullies” advisedly, because men—and it is mostly men—who want to silence women and prevent them from organising as a sex class are bullies and human rights deniers.

The right has a strong tradition of standing up for free speech and freedom of assembly, for which I applaud it, and so once did the left in the United Kingdom. The left must stand up for free speech again where women’s rights are concerned, and it must not give in to intimidation. The left should not let the right have a monopoly on free speech and freedom of assembly. Those rights are fundamental human rights and should matter to all of us as democrats, regardless of whether we sit on the right or, as SNP Members do, on the left of politics.

Women must be allowed to organise to protect their hard won sex-based rights, and, on International Women’s Day, this House should stand up against the bullies who are seeking to prevent them from doing that.