Gender Critical Beliefs: Equality Act 2010

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rosie Duffield]

Absolutely, and I thank the hon. Member so much for raising that case. It shocked and peaked quite a lot of people that just asking for single-sex services when they are more vital than ever got Roz Adams into so much hot water. It is absolutely unbelievable, and good luck to her in her fight.

Ironically, the name calling—the extreme, nasty and degrading names used for women and sometimes men who do not accept that biological men can be women—is often under the guise of “being kind”. Gender critical women are frequently shut down, told to be quiet, or told that it is not right to use accurate language to describe our bodies. Words and language matter, and material reality matters infinitely. There are situations where sex matters and the rights of women and girls must take precedence. Women and girls must be able to use language to describe our experiences and not be persecuted for causing offence or distress.

To believe in women’s sex-based rights and publicly advocate for them results in being readily labelled as hateful or transphobic. However, I am gender critical because I am a feminist and care deeply about the rights of women and girls. I do not seek to destroy the rights of trans-identifying people or any other group, and never have done. My sex-based rights as a woman have nothing to do with those other groups of people.

Gender critical beliefs are legally protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010, following the Forstater employment tribunal case in 2021. The tribunal found that Maya Forstater’s beliefs, which she sincerely holds, are widely shared, based on fact, and are reflective of the law of the land, yet despite that judgment, in the four years since there has been an unprecedented run—a steady stream—of similar high-profile and costly employment tribunal cases involving gender critical beliefs that point to a problem that many in this place refuse to acknowledge, including, I am afraid, the Minister responding to this debate.

The normalisation of visible hostility towards anyone expressing widely held gender critical beliefs, even on our own green Benches, has been framed as an expression of solidarity with trans and non-binary people. Those within organisations that sign up to expensive re-education programmes, many of which misrepresent the law, and diktats on all employees signing off emails with pronouns, legitimise the constant, passive-aggressive and soft—or even aggressive and open—bullying of those who refuse to comply.

Those who disagree with gender critical beliefs routinely stigmatise women like me as bigoted, a view that arises from a total misunderstanding of what our beliefs are or the motivations of many of those who share them. The social and financial costs of voicing gender critical beliefs, and of challenging assumptions in their workplace, mean that many are afraid and feel they cannot afford to speak up. Still, day after day people who raise concerns about boundaries around single-sex spaces such as changing rooms are being disciplined, dismissed, and hounded from their workplaces.

Two such cases currently attracting huge attention are those of the Darlington nurses and the Fife nurse, Sandie Peggie. Their tribunals have brought the clash of rights into sharp relief. Few people reading that when adult female nurses challenged their employers to stop biological men changing in the women’s changing room could believe that they were disciplined. I have yet to speak to a single British voter who believes that a man should have whatever access he desires to spaces where women are getting dressed or undressed for work. .

Our evidence base is limited, as academics are afraid to research this area for fear of ending up hounded out of their jobs, as academics Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Laura Favaro and many others have been. None the less, the body of evidence is growing. In its rapid evidence review on harassment and censorship to inform the Khan review published in March last year, More in Common found significant anecdotal evidence of harassment faced by groups of gender critical activists. Gender critical people face high levels of harassment in their everyday lives, leading to self-censorship on a scale that should alarm anyone who believes in liberal democracy—including gender critical MPs who have yet to speak up in public.

Gender critical people face severe consequences for engaging in the debate, ranging from social ostracization to loss of employment and livelihood, all for holding three core beliefs: that women—adult human females—are materially definable as a class of human being; that women are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with our own set of needs, rights and concerns; and that women have the right to meet and discuss freely that which affects our lives profoundly.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I take the opportunity to acknowledge the hon. Lady’s bravery in standing up for what she believes in. Does she agree with me that there is a wider political danger from this form of indoctrination and extremism about gender and sex, which is that if the only people in politics who are prepared to speak out about it are from extreme right-wing movements, and mainstream politicians are too afraid to say anything, it pushes ordinary people in the direction of political extremes?

[Rosie Duffield]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman so much for raising that important point. Just for speaking up, I, a left-wing member of the Labour party, have been called a Reform member and all kinds of names, and it has been suggested that I join a right-wing party, yet an awful lot of the articles I read agreeing with me are in the Morning Star. People do not really listen to the ideology behind our beliefs and why we speak up for the rights of working women, which is what the Labour party was founded to do.

We have a duty in this place to ensure that people who hold gender critical beliefs are given the respect they are entitled to. We need to find a workable solution that respects everyone’s beliefs and protected characteristics. I finish by paying tribute to the brave and incredible women—and some men—who know that only women have a cervix and who have stood up to those hounding them at great personal and financial risk to themselves: Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey, Jo Phoenix, Rachel Meade, Roz Adams, Denise Fahmy, Eleanor Frances, Almut Gadow, Laura Favaro, Amelia Sparrow, Jenny Lindsay, Kathleen Stock, Rosie Kay, Selina Todd, Rosa Freedman, Lizzy Pitt and my dearest TERF friends Jo Rowling, Suzanne Moore and supreme shero pioneer Julie Bindel. Those women are just the tip of the iceberg.

I was elected on a manifesto pledge to make the country work for working people. These are working people who are being persecuted for their legal and respectable beliefs. They continue to be let down by cowardly leadership. I have been hounded, harassed, sidelined and briefed against by a party now in government. It is time the Government got to grips with this issue, perhaps by following the lead of the incredibly brave women I have referenced here and the unsung foot soldiers who fight for women’s rights in the workplace the world over.