Changing and Toilet Facilities in Public Buildings

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend and noble Baronesses in this short but very important debate. As usual, I shall speak quite bluntly.

As one of 800,000 wheelchair users, I, too, have an interest in access to toilets and I agree with what has been said so far about their inadequacy. There are over 70,000 public buildings in the UK that wheelchair users cannot get into, let alone have the luxury of deciding which toilet to use. My blunt message to the Government tonight is this: when will you stand up to the small, militant, transgender fascist lobby and say that the rights of 32 million real women and 800,000 wheelchair users are more important than the rights of tens of thousands who identify as transgender?

As every doctor and even first-year medical student knows, there are only two biological sexes, male and female, with a tiny number of people who are known as genuine hermaphrodites, male pseudo-hermaphrodites or female pseudo-hermaphrodites. These people have some male and female chromosomes and it is a well-recognised medical condition that deserves respect and support. Whether Miss Rebecca Long Bailey MP likes it or not, sex is biological and binary and is not a social construct.

However—and this is very important—medical science quite rightly recognises the well-known medical condition that there are people who feel an overwhelming sense of a different gender identity. That is perfectly okay and acceptable. The Gender Recognition Act quite rightly lets these people change their sexual identity after showing the gender recognition panel that they have transitioned over a two-year period. That is a wise and sensible process and does not deprive any transsexual person of any rights, real or imagined.

I urge the Government, therefore, to drop the suggestion that the process should be abandoned and not to permit the absurdity of self-identification, with the huge loss in freedom and safety for women that that would entail. I say “absurdity” but it is more of an obscenity, because we have the reality, as seen in Answers to Parliamentary Questions tabled by me, of male rapist convicts suddenly telling the Prison Service that they are identifying as women and our useless, incompetent, politically correct Prison Service immediately transferring them to female prison wings where they have raped and sexually assaulted real women prisoners. What a wonderful sexual predators charter. The Prison Service should move these men back to the male wings immediately until they have satisfied the two-year transitional condition.

As a man—even one in a wheelchair—I cannot imagine the fear and lack of safe space that women can face when they go to the loo and some big, hulking male brute comes in demanding to use the facilities because he has decided that he wants to identify as a woman that day. I entirely respect his right to adopt a woman’s sexual identity, but not until he has satisfied the 2004 Act and fully transitioned over the two-year period.

Of course, I have often attempted to get wheelchair access to buildings, but I made some big mistakes in my two failed attempts to get the Government to amend the Equality Act. What all we 800,000 wheelchair users should have done was claim that we were self-identifying as women or men and then a whole industry would have moved into high gear to get us access to anywhere we wanted in the country, and no doubt we would have had the police running around as well, checking out wheelchair transgender hate crimes.

This excessive nonsense has to stop. I repeat that I deeply respect those who want or need to change their sexual identity, but I want the Government to stand up to the militant, fascist transgender lobby—the small militant minority—particularly those who try to change the sex of children. I and many doctors are deeply concerned about the work of the Tavistock clinic, which is giving puberty-blocking drugs to children aged 11—children who may not know at that young age what their sexual identity will be in later life. Giving sex-change drugs to young children might completely destroy their lives if, later on when they mature, they come to a different view on their sexual identity.

I support the proposition put forward by my noble friend Lord Lucas that at least half of public toilets and changing facilities should be reserved for women. That means less than half for men, but that is okay because, as a man, I am always mystified that queues for women’s toilets seem to be a lot longer than queues for the male ones, although we had better not go into that. My noble friend’s proposal would allow all transgender people to have a choice, once they have transitioned as per our law, and there must be no question of others who have merely self-identified picking and choosing on a daily basis what toilet they use.