On Saturday 17th June, Baroness Anne Jenkin gave a speech at the Conservative Eastern Region & CWO Eastern Annual Conference, titled 'What Will Your Political Legacy Be?'

Baroness Jenkin spoke about her experiences in co-founding Women 2 Win in 2005, and her goal of getting more women into Parliament. It has been very successful, but as always, there is still more to do.

She then turned to another aspect of her political legacy, and it is that part of the speech we are honoured to publish today. Those who were present will recall the audience response; a thoroughly deserved standing ovation.

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“Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me turn now to another aspect of what I hope my political legacy will be. I have entered the fray in a connected, but different battle, a battle to defend the right to even name ourselves as women.

You cannot fail to have noticed that the word woman is being redefined. We get called ‘cervix havers’, ‘menstruators’, ‘birthing bodies’. In September 2021, the Lancet described us on its front cover as 'bodies with vaginas’.

The dictionary definition is very clear; a woman is an adult human female. The Equality Act 2010 is also clear: section 212 states 'woman' means a female of any age. Up until a few years ago, none of this was disputed. We all knew what a woman was, we probably didn't even think about it. I certainly didn’t. We all knew what a woman is because we all came out of one. Then slowly, insidiously, the word woman became somehow difficult to define.

The use of phrases such as 'cervix-havers' is not only dehumanising and problematic for women who don't understand this terminology; it is also politically dis-empowering. When the word woman gets expanded to include others, it means women and girls are left with no words to describe ourselves and our own unique needs.

On 12th June 2023 this issue was finally given a proper airing in a parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall. Many parliamentarians have spoken on issues surrounding the definition of sex in various debates in both houses, but this was the first time that 3 hours of debate was devoted to discussing why sex matters. 

And, quite simply, we now need to look at clarifying the Equality Act, if we are to help service providers maintain single-sex spaces and services. It has become increasingly difficult to maintain these services due to the fear of being sued if self-identified 'women' are prevented from using them; i.e. I am referring here to men who say they are women. I am proud to say that almost all the Conservative MPs who spoke had a thorough grasp of the issues, from sport to hospital wards, and I highly recommend you watch the debate or read the Hansard transcript.

Women's groups like Sex Matters, Fair Play for Women, and Conservatives For Women in our own party have been fighting to be heard on these issues. 

Well-connected and well-funded lobby groups have been pushing gender identity ideology in every area of our government and in society, in the civil service, in our institutions, in schools, hospitals, sports, the arts, - but these women have been fighting back. I am proud to support them and work with them along with many others. Helen Joyce, now a director of Sex Matters has written a must-read book giving a comprehensive overview of the issues: Trans: Where Ideology meets Reality. I highly recommend it.

Being a woman is one of the things that unites us politically; we are female and we are therefore different from males. This has implications across the board; from healthcare, to education, to political representation to name just three. It doesn't mean we are bound by our biology, it means our biology affects how we operate in the world, from needing menstrual products and maternity services, to needing menopause support and access to HRT. From needing a level playing field in sport so that girls and women can excel, to needing doctors who understand we are not just 'small men'. You may not be aware, for example, that heart attacks present very differently in women than they do in men?

Men and women are different in a myriad of ways, but none of us can deny that the world we live in was built mainly for men, which is why women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured if they are in a car accident. If you have not read Caroline Criado Perez's excellent book 'Invisible Women' exposing all these issues then I recommend you do so.  I warn you though, you may need to read it in small doses as it has a tendency to make one grab the nearest person, thrust the book under their nose, and say “Can you believe this?!”

No doubt many of you have read articles in the press about the Tavistock Clinic, the NHS Gender Identity Service for children, and the explosion in the number of girls being referred. In many cases these girls feel they will be happier as boys, yet that is unattainable. Why do they think this? Well I believe porn and social media play big parts in this.

Extreme, violent pornography is available 24/7 via smartphones. I recently wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph supporting age verification in the Online Safety Bill, which resulted in my inbox being absolutely flooded by parents saying “Please keep going”.

Analysis of videos recommended to first-time users on three of the most popular porn sites, Pornhub, Xvideos, and xHamster, found that one in every eight titles described sexual activities that constitutes sexual violence as defined by the WHO. In most cases, that violence is perpetrated against women, and, in those videos, the women respond to that violence either with pleasure or neutrality. Incest was the most frequent form of sexual violence recommended to users. The second most common category recommended was that of physical aggression and sexual assault. This is not the dark web, or some far corner of the internet; these are mainstream porn sites, and they are currently accessed every month by 1.4 million UK children. There is literally nothing at the moment to stop them seeing this horrible, violent stuff.

Anecdotal evidence shows that the 5,000% increase in the number of girls going through puberty now wishing to identify as male is at least partly driven by seeing this vile porn and coming to the conclusion that they would rather not be women if that is what sex involves. To add to your reading list I also recommend Abigail Shrier's book 'Irreversible Damage' which gives a compelling account of how social media, and social contagion, facilitated by smartphones, may be driving this increase. Shrier concludes that far too much of the discourse around being female is negative, and offers a series of steps which parents can take to enhance their daughters' well-being.

We must endeavour to give these girls and young women the belief that being a woman is a positive thing, and that once through puberty, things do begin to look different. We need to be role models but in order to do that we must be able to reclaim our language.

Quite simply, without being able to use the word 'woman', and understand what we mean by it, our needs can be obscured and even ignored, rather than making it clear that that those needs are shared by 51% of the electorate.

A hot topic at every general election is a discussion of the 'women’s vote' as if women are distinct from the 'normal' votes cast. Given that women make up 51 per cent of the UK population and an even greater proportion of eligible voters – and are just as likely to vote as men – the average voter is in fact a woman.

But women do behave differently from men in some ways when it comes to voting. Women are disproportionately represented among undecided voters, and they tend to make up their minds who to vote for closer to election day - but they are just as likely to vote as men. Indeed, if you crunch the numbers women are slightly more likely to vote than men, due to women’s greater longevity combined with higher levels of electoral engagement among our older population. Turnout among women and men of the same age is pretty similar, but the so-called 'grey' vote is much more a female vote than the electorate overall.

So any politician at any level who does not take heed of the particular needs and interests of women is foolish. Women are not 'non-men'.

Yet we now find the word 'woman' is a political hot potato; politicians quail at the thought they might be asked to define it, others tie themselves in knots as they desperately attempt to avoid the question, because being clear on the definition of woman is now considered to be something that must not be said.

How did we get here? How did we find ourselves in such a sorry state of affairs that the Leader of the Opposition tells Andrew Marr that “it’s not right to say” only women have a cervix. And that in fact “it should not be said”. He recently said 99.9% of women don't have a penis which some are seeing as progress!

Well, in some ways it was kindness that brought us here. There is a tiny minority of the population who suffer from crippling gender dysphoria, severe discomfort with their body, that for some can be alleviated by presenting as the opposite sex. The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 created a legal route for people to change their 'gender'. It has a gate-keeping process; applicants must have a medical diagnosis and provide documents that show they have been living in their 'acquired gender' for two years. We will gloss over how one is supposed to 'live as a woman' because I have never seen it expressed other than in the form of stereotypes.

We must be clear at this point that humans cannot change their sex; sex is binary and immutable, but we can change our bodies with hormones and in some cases surgery to more closely resemble the opposite sex. The GRA creates a 'legal fiction' in that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate can be recognised as the opposite sex for some purposes, mainly marriage and pensions, but not all. It certainly does not confer upon men the right to women's spaces, services, sports, and opportunities. It may not surprise you to hear that women who gain a GRC to have the 'legal fiction' of being male cannot inherit peerages for male heirs; the House of Lords clearly know what sex is.

The GRA neatly got around the issue of same-sex marriage which was not legal at the time, as a person who was granted a GRC could apply to have a birth certificate issued in their new 'gender', enabling them to legally enter into a marriage. It was envisaged that this new law would only affect around 5000 to 6000 people; as of June 2021 over 6000 Gender Recognition Certificates have been issued and numbers of applications appear to be rising.

The debates on the bill in 2004, recorded in Hansard, make very interesting reading. Numerous politicians, particularly in the House of Lords, including Lord Norman Tebbit, pointed out that the GRA could have unintended consequences; there were attempts to carve out protections for sport and prisons for example, as it was clearly not a good idea for males to be allowed to play in women's sports, or for fully intact males to be put into female prisons. (There is no requirement for surgery in order to obtain a GRC, nor does a criminal record prevent one from acquiring a GRC).
Almost every objection was waved away and it was passed with very little fanfare and not much notice was taken by the press.

Yet all those things that we were told would never happen, have happened. Over the years, thanks to lobby groups like Stonewall, the words 'woman' and 'female' have been expanded, with no care for how this affects us. Women are no longer 'adult human females', or even gender dysphoric men with a GRC and a new birth certificate. A woman is now anyone who says they are a woman.

When words like ‘woman’ and ‘female’ get expanded to include the male sex it has real life consequences. Newspapers run headlines like:
“Woman found with indecent images of children”.
“Woman exposes herself in public park”.
“Woman accused of rape”.
 
Readers are misled into thinking increasing numbers of sex offenders are female, when in fact female sex offenders are vanishingly rare. Sex offending is a crime committed almost exclusively by males. We need to be clear about that, because if we are not, then how can we even begin to get to the root of the problem?

When a female rape victim asks for a woman to examine her, she needs to be sure that her request will be respected. If your elderly mum requests only female carers provide her with intimate and personal care, she needs to be sure her request will be respected.

Yet women in these and similar situations, who have objected when confronted with a man who 'identifies' as a woman, have been called bigots and transphobes. A recent document produced by the NHS Confederation said it is the feelings of the medical practitioner that matter more than those of the patient.

Women’s prisons have had male rapists, complete with a penis, interred with female inmates. In March this year, the MoJ announced that men who identify as women will no longer be housed in women's prisons if they have male genitalia or have committed sexual or violent crimes, with exceptions only to be made with ministerial authority. Again, this was down to years of work by women's groups; not a perfect outcome, but a vast improvement. They continue to push for the rule that no men, whatever their crimes, should be in a woman's prison.

When describing sexual assault, we see newspapers write about ‘her erect penis’ and victims aren’t allowed to refer to their assault as ‘male violence’. One woman who was physically assaulted by a man was censured by the judge for failing to call her male attacker 'she', because that was his preferred pronoun. Female prisoners can be punished for 'misgendering' the males in their prison.

In health care, people with male bodies get called for cervical screening by the NHS, but others with female bodies get missed off, because lobby groups have convinced the NHS that we no longer need to keep a record of a person's sex, only their 'gender identity'.

In sport, women and girls are being beaten, and sometimes even injured, by bigger, faster and stronger males in their own sports; women’s sports.

Women are being told to take precautions around lone male police officers while at the same time women are losing access to spaces where males can’t follow. Even Marks and Spencer encourage customers to use the changing room where they 'feel most comfortable'. Yes, that does include the changing room in the women's lingerie department. Voyeurism is a male crime yet many women are completely unaware of the dangers of hidden cameras. If men are not allowed into spaces where we are vulnerable and undressed the danger is mitigated, yet major stores now allow men to go where they please, so terrified are they of offending the lobby groups who push the mantra 'I am who I say I am.'

The Home Secretary has called for the police to take crimes like indecent exposure more seriously yet at the same time any man can be naked in the women’s changing rooms at the local gym, because he might 'identify as transgender'.

Extreme trans activism and gender ideology are breaking down the social norms, the social contract between males and females, where we respect each other’s differences and make room for each other’s needs. It is also creating a safeguarding nightmare. The effect on children is a whole other speech.

The British Pregnancy Advice Service articulated this whole problem very well when they bucked the trend and said “We will continue to use the word 'woman' over 'people' so we can continue to campaign effectively for reproductive rights. If we cannot articulate that it is predominantly women who are affected, rather than people at large, we will find it harder to dismantle a framework that is underpinned by sexism”. This of course ultimately benefits all female people who need their services, including those trans people who do not identify as women.

It was only swift action in the House of Lords that prevented the term 'pregnant person' being incorporated into the Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Bill, otherwise known as the MoMa bill. Almost everybody who spoke from all around the House was clear that the use of the phrases such as “pregnant person” in the Bill was unacceptable. The phrase was replaced with the term “mother or expectant mother”.

When words lose their meaning 'women’s rights' just become 'people’s rights'. Male violence against women just becomes ‘people’s violence against other people’. Boys sexually assaulting girls in school just becomes 'peer on peer violence'.

As you go out knocking on doors this issue will come up, so please do your homework. Parents are concerned about their children, women are concerned about losing their women only spaces, everyone is concerned that their dignity and privacy are being eroded without their consent.
Pressure groups may well ask you to agree with certain statements, so before you get asked to say “transwomen are women” and “transmen are men”, make sure you know what you are signing up to.

It sounds progressive, it sounds kind, it sounds simple, it sounds harmless.  I have said it myself. Surely only transphobes and bigots would disagree with those phrases? The fact is they are designed to close down debate. There is a conflict of rights here. Both sides matter and deserve to be heard.

Don't be like Lisa Nandy, who when asked whether a rapist should serve out their sentence in a women’s prison because they now identify as a woman, said “I think transwomen are women and they should be accommodated in a prison of their choosing”.

Don't be like Ed Davey, who when asked whether there should “ever be spaces for women, where biological males should not go?” said “No”.  The LibDems are deep into this ideology and we should not let them forget it.

Don't be like David Lammy who said that women who object to these phrases and to the loss of their single-sex spaces are just “dinosaurs hoarding their rights”.

When you say those words you are aligning yourself with a set of beliefs that most voters would find baffling. And, it has consequences. Say “transmen are men”, and you too could find yourself telling Andrew Marr that “it’s not right to say” only women have a cervix. And that “it should not be said”.

Initially the phrase “transwomen are women” was motivated by a kindness to make a few people with gender dysphoria feel better.

It has now become a political demand that transwomen must be considered literally female, indistinguishable from females and that their birth sex must kept a secret, that their male bodies are in fact female bodies. That their penis is a female sex organ.

That demand impacts us all.

Don’t turn your back on women and girls.  All the polling shows that it is not just the right thing to do, but the popular thing.  Take a look at #Labourlosingwomen if you have any doubts. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, until you see it, you don’t see it.  But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

If you have sensitivity and compassion for trans people, please make sure you also have compassion for women and girls too - and join me in the campaign to ensure this matters.”

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