Labour is leaving women’s rights in limbo

Why is the Labour Party so terrified of biology? At every turn, it chooses to pour more confusion than clarity over the clash between sex and ‘gender identity’. Earlier this month, the Telegraph revealed that Keir Starmer’s UK Labour government will not clarify the legal definition of ‘female’.

The Equality Act 2010 currently defines a woman as ‘a female of any age’. But there is confusion over whether or not this includes men who have changed their ‘legal sex’ to female by obtaining a gender-recognition certificate. The previous Conservative government intended to rewrite the legislation to specify that ‘sex’ as a protected characteristic refers to ‘biological sex’. Labour has no such plans to do the same. When asked about the matter in parliament earlier this month, minister for women and equalities Annaliese Dodds said that Labour is ‘proud of the Equality Act and the rights and protections it affords women’ and that ‘the government does not plan to amend legal definitions in the act’.

As a result, the loophole that has been exploited to place biological males into women’s prisons, women’s sports and women’s shelters will remain wide open. A clarification would allow public bodies and organisations to legally prevent men from entering spaces that are meant to be women-only. Back in July, while campaigning in the run-up to the General Election and under pressure from women’s rights groups, Starmer appeared to understand this. ‘I’ve always said biological women’s spaces need to be protected’, he said. But how will he protect those vital rights if his government is unable to even say what a woman is?

The Tories are not much better on this question. In response to Dodds’s announcement, shadow minister for women and equalities Mims Davies condemned Labour’s position: ‘Only by legally enshrining the importance of single-sex spaces can this Labour government give biological women the clarity, dignity, privacy and safety we need.’ That sounds encouraging, but let’s not forget that the Conservatives had 14 years in government to clarify or rewrite the Equality Act. And yet former PM Rishi Sunak only decided to announce this as a policy pledge in the run-up to the last General Election.

Both the Tories and Labour have left women and girls tangled up in nonsensical chaos. We remain at the mercy of a virulent trans lobby, whose tactics include hounding women out of their employment, destroying their reputations and even calling for violence against women who dare object to gender ideology.

To add insult to injury, last week the now Labour-dominated parliament elected the new chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee. This is an important role tasked with holding ‘government to account on equality law and policy’. The position went to the Labour MP for Luton, Sarah Owen, yet another politician who duly subscribes to gender ideology. The other Labour MP in the running for the position was Kate Osborne, who similarly believes that ‘some women have a penis’.

Owen may struggle in her new role, given that she doesn’t seem quite sure what a woman is. On BBC’s Woman’s Hour last week, Owens said: ‘A woman to me is somebody who is going to be paid less than their male counterpart, somebody who is going to be less safe walking down the street… somebody who faces more barriers in the workplace, in education, in the health sector.’

This is obviously nonsense. Women are not some nebulous and indefinable somebody – women are female people. The fact that we need to even have this conversation is a testament to the absurdity that society is being forced to fight. We are born with a biological sex. It inhabits every cell in our bodies and it cannot be modified, by any means. Why is Labour so afraid to support women in clarifying what we can all observe with our own eyes?

We wouldn’t be in this bizarre, infuriating situation were it not for politicians of both parties deliberately confusing common-sense terminology. Now Labour has wasted another opportunity to fix the problem. This is a dereliction of duty. Apart from it being a betrayal of the women’s rights campaigners who believed Labour’s election promises, it is a betrayal of the women and girls up and down the country who desperately need the law to better protect their rights.

Raquel Rosario Sanchez is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic.