Gender

You might not have noticed that yesterday the Government announced possible changes to the Gender Recognition Act. That’s what ministers wanted: the announcement was carefully made late in the day and was partly obscured by an earlier promise to ban “conversion therapy” that tries to stop gay people being gay. Why did the Government bury its transgender announcement? The approach was very different last autumn when the Prime Minister herself fronted a prominent media drive which Tory spinners said showed that the Conservatives were inclining towards a system of “self-identified” gender. Yesterday, by contrast, ministers released a deliberately neutral set of consultation questions and kicked decisions on reform into early 2019

Earlier this week, I wrote about David Lewis, a Labour member who was allowed to stand for election as a constituency women’s officer on the basis that he identifies as a woman under some circumstances. That report seems to have drawn some attention, not least from Labour HQ. David Lewis was told on Tuesday night that he has been suspended from the party and cannot therefore stand for election as Basingstoke CLP women’s officer. I’ll try to unravel the implications of that in a moment, but first I want to say something about David Lewis and the general debate around this case. As is usual with debates around gender, a

Even if you don’t know who Stephen Doughty MP is, if you’re vaguely familiar with the history of New Labour, you’ll know his story: Oxford, a job for a senior Labour politician and a brief spell working in charities. Then selection for a safe seat in his early 30s, thanks to a combination of talent and friends in the right places. Now 38 and having resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench over, well, Jeremy Corbyn, Doughty sits on the Home Affairs Committee, which, among other things, is inquiring into hate crime, and its causes. To that end, the committee last week took evidence from a bunch of newspaper editors about

OK, I admit I’m a bit of a Mumsnet groupie, but this needs to be said: Justine Roberts is great. Roberts is the founder of Mumsnet who has this week come out fighting for free speech and sensible political discussion, both of which are at risk in the debate about gender laws. Why Mumsnet? Because a website previously best known for chat about childcare, biscuits and something called a penis beaker has developed an important role in an important political debate. As I and others have noted before, it can be hard to talk about the politics and policy of gender and sex if you aren’t prepared to simply repeat, without question,

It’s International Women’s Day. As feminists rush to detail the many disadvantages still facing women (yes, all women, everywhere) we’ll no doubt hear a great deal about the gender pay gap. In that regard, International Women’s Day is a bit like every other day of the year. But let’s go with it. According to the Office for National Statistics, the gap between the median hourly earnings of men and women working full time is 9.1 per cent. The Fawcett Society prefers the mean figure of 14.1 per cent. Actually, they’d like us to focus on the gap between the total average earnings of men compared to women – about 18.4

Journalists and politicians talk a lot about freedom of speech, and rightly so, because the ability to express thoughts and opinions without fear or restraint is the foundation of democracy. We must be free to question, free to doubt, or we are not free at all. But for journalists and politicians, ‘freedom of speech’ can feel a bit of an abstract concept, a debating point not a matter of personal safety. We talk about curbs on free speech as things that make it harder for us to do what we do – write and talk. We rarely think about them in terms of physical fear. So a couple of weeks

This article is about gender and the law. When I asked several friends, politicians and journalists, about writing it, they all said the same: don’t. It will go badly for you. And that is why I’m writing this. In fact, that’s what I’m writing about: fear. The fear that persuades some people they can’t say what they think about something, or even ask questions about it. Fear that prevents proper discussion of public policy and the public interest. Fear that chills debate. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years. I belong to no party and I have no allegiances or affiliations. I don’t have an agenda or an axe to

It was always going to be difficult for Theresa May’s government to secure a legacy beyond Brexit. With the negotiations running into difficulty, it becomes all the harder. Ministers must avoid, however, resorting to well-meant gestures which open the government to ridicule. Take, for instance, the revelation that Britain has insisted on the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights making reference to pregnant transgendered people — although it now denies that it objected to the term ‘pregnant women’. The purpose of the relevant clause is deeply serious — to dissuade malignant regimes from subjecting pregnant women to the death penalty. Britain’s approach, by contrast, has an air of