Rosie Duffield

I beg to move, That this House has considered gender critical beliefs and the Equality Act 2010. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. The Equality Act, passed by a Labour Government in 2010, protects people from discrimination based on nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. The Act has a commendable objective: to prevent people from acting on their prejudices and disagreements in a way that results in the discriminatory treatment of others. It exists not to eliminate difference or ensure conformity, but to foster good relations and tolerance between different groups. Sometimes rights clash. Very few examples of that clash have played out as publicly and discordantly as that between sex and gender identity: that is, the rights of biological women, and sometimes men, and the rights of those who change their social gender to transition to women. Significant feminist gains have been made in policy and law since the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Those gains include recognition of specific rights and services for women on the basis of their sex, be that in hospital wards, prisons, rape services, domestic abuse shelters, lesbian dating sites and clubs, women’s health organisations and women’s sports teams—spaces that meet our specific requirements as women. Those gains are being eroded by the blind acceptance by some, including policy makers in this place, that anybody who identifies as a woman de facto becomes one. At a time when male violence against women and girls is at epidemic levels in the UK, women’s single-sex spaces could not be more important. Our desire to be kind, inclusive and accepting are worthy and valuable human traits. It is that pursuit of tolerance that underpins our law on discrimination.