Legislative Definition of Sex

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Monday 12th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard]

I will carry on if I may. Single-sex services can and do exclude trans women at the moment, using the law as it stands. Changing the definition of sex is unnecessary to achieve that policy aim. Indeed, the majority of the examples used around the room in this debate so far are already covered by the Equality Act. I am worried that the debate and the direction of travel in which this can take us could lead to a roll-back of hard-won rights for the LGBT+ community and will potentially exclude more trans people from public spaces and allow discrimination to go unchallenged.

I want to hear more trans voices in the debate and I would like us to spend as much time talking about trans people’s access to healthcare as we spend talking about trans people’s rights to use a toilet. In the south-west at the moment, the waiting list to access trans healthcare is seven years—it is seven years. That is a disgraceful amount of time. I challenge all those people who spend so much time focusing on toilets to spend as much time focusing on healthcare and the delays in the system in order to achieve a fair place for us all. Let me say this clearly: the carefully crafted words that suggest that trans people accessing the toilets or changing rooms that they are legally allowed to access makes them a sexual predator are disgusting and wrong. What that does is contribute to a rise in hate against people. One of my friends, who describes herself as a butch lesbian, has been asked to leave toilets countless times. All she wants to do is go for a wee. But she has been asked to leave toilets countless times because of a rise in hate. She was born a girl; she is now a proud woman—a proud lesbian. But the rise in hate in the debate and around our country means that she worries about going to the toilet because of what other people may think of her. That is not right.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Luke Pollard]

I will carry on if I may, because I am running out of time. It is important that we defend the Equality Act, because there are so many examples that are already covered by the Equality Act; it is important that we all look carefully at it. I appreciate that some MPs have wanted to have this debate for quite some time—wanted to have a debate about biological sex. But what I hope we can all agree on is that the right of trans people to exist, to be authentically themselves and to thrive should not be up for debate. This is why we have to be careful. We need to ensure that the debate in this country does not go down the path of how we are seeing the debate develop in America. What happened in America—we can see this—is that first they came for trans people; then they came for the rest of the LGBT+ community. As we see from the 400 pieces of legislation—