MPs are finally engaging with the gender identity debate

I used to write a lot about sex and gender here. I don’t do so quite as much these days for a few reasons, one of which is that the issues involved are now better recognised and better handled by people whose job it is to deal with the complexities of policies and conflicts of rights and arguments.

An example of that came at the weekend when Baroness Falkner, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, told the Times that women should not be penalised or abused if they believe that transgender women do not become female by dint of their professed identity.

‘Someone can believe that people who self-identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self-identify,’ she said. ‘A lot of people would find this an entirely reasonable belief.’

In other words, the UK’s human rights authority says you don’t have to accept that trans women are female.