Kemi Badenoch is right to review the definition of sex

Kemi Badenoch is considering a change to the Equality Act 2010 that would restore the meaning of sex to what everybody once understood. I am a science teacher, so I know this. There are two sexes: male and female. Females produces large gametes called eggs while males produce small motile gametes called sperm. Science doesn’t care whether it happens in frogs, monkeys or people – sexual reproduction is a robust process that has been around for millions of years.

Maybe – even as recently as 2010 – this was so obvious that it did not need to be stated when legislation was drafted. The Equality Act defines the protected characteristic of sex, quite simply as, ‘a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a man or to a woman’. But when Keir Starmer of all people now seems to think that one in a thousand women have a penis – and presumably the capability of producing sperm – clarity is desperately needed.

In February, Badenoch asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to advise her on ‘the benefits or otherwise of an amendment to the 2010 Act on the current definition of “sex”’.