Protecting Women

The debates about the rights of women and girls and the need to protect them, and similarly about about the need to protect Trans people, have become intertwined in the most toxic way. It has somehow become  difficult to make a statement about the needs and rights of women without one group of people calling you a transphobe, or about the needs and rights of trans people without another group suggesting you want to abolish all protection for women.

We need to find language, and reinforce the law, to respect women and protect rights for which women have been fighting for centuries, without disrespecting or harming trans people, and vice versa.

And it is apparently that the law needs to be clarified.

Today the Conservatives are   are announcing a clear plan to amend the Equality Act to make clear that the protected characteristic of sex is biological sex, enhancing protections and maintaining single-sex spaces for women and girls’ dignity, privacy and safety. 

The Labour Party passed the Equality Act more than a decade ago and it is now obvious there is a lack of clarity in the law. Our change to the Equality Act, to clarify that the protected characteristic of sex means biological sex, adopts a compassionate and common sense approach to protect the safety of women and girls in single sex spaces like women’s prisons. 

The Conservatives will ensure that single-sex services and spaces are protected, ensuring the safety of women and girls.

This morning, 3rd June 2024, The Conservatives promised to define the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act as biological sex. 

• Labour passed the Equality Act more than a decade ago, but it is now clear there is a lack of clarity in the law, leaving single-sex providers vulnerable to challenge, risking the safety of women and girls. 
• That is why we will introduce primary legislation to clarify that the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act means biological sex, in addition to legislating that a person can only have one sex in the eyes of the law in the United Kingdom. 
• This will ensure that single-sex services and single-sex spaces can be provided, ensuring protection for women and girls, as well as enabling the debate on these issues to move onto a more informed and constructive basis. 

We are doing this by: 

• Introducing primary legislation to clarify that the protected characteristic of sex means biological sex in the Equality Act to ensure proper protections for women and girls. This follows the recommendations of the Equality and Human Rights Commission who advised that defining ‘sex’ as biological sex for the purposes of the Equality Act ‘would bring greater legal clarity’ (ECHR, News, 4 April 2023; The Daily Telegraph, 2 June 2024). 
• Protecting single-sex spaces such as women’s-only wards in hospitals, to ensure women are treated with dignity and respect. We believe biological women should almost always be accommodated on same sex wards with other biological women. There are very few circumstances in which mixed sex accommodation can be clinically justified. That is why we are making it more straightforward for hospitals to make a women’s-only ward a space for biological women, so they can be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.
• Protecting freedom of association for women and men. We are correcting the current situation to allow single-sex organisations, for example a women’s victim support group, to restrict membership to biological women.
• Ensuring that a person in the United Kingdom can only have one legal sex in the eyes of the law. We are one United Kingdom and it cannot be right to have people legally recognised as different genders in different parts of the country so we will establish in law that gender recognition in a reserved matter.