‘Biological Sex’ Will Be Affirmed in Equality Act to Protect Women, Pledge Conservatives

Undated file photo of Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch. (Liam McBurney/PA)

The Conservatives have said that if they win the next election, they will clarify language pertaining to “sex” in the Equality Act to mean “biological sex.”

Minister for women and equalities Kemi Badenoch said that the changes were needed to protect women and girls from “predators” who are “exploiting loopholes in the law by calling themselves trans with no evidence beyond their self-identification” in order to access female spaces.

Ms. Badenoch wrote in The Times of London on Sunday that the law has become “confused” as the uses of “gender” and “sex”—at one time, synonymous—have changed since the act became law in 2010, saying that “words in law are being re-interpreted to meanings quite different from what legislators intended.”

“That’s why today we are pledging that if we form a government after the election, we will clarify that ’sex' in the Equality Act, means biological sex,” she promised.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that the safety of women and girls is “too important to allow the current confusion around definitions of sex and gender to persist.”

Protection From Legal Action

The minister said the change would protect single-sex spaces, such as abuse and rape crisis centres, hospital wards, and prisons.

A future Conservative government would also protect providers of women’s-only spaces from being sued for not admitting biological men.

“It also allows us to make a women’s-only ward in a hospital a space for biological women, without those hospitals fearing legal action,” the minister said.

The pledge to protect hospitals from legal action came after Health Secretary Victoria Atkins announced in April plans to update the NHS Constitution so that it will affirm sex-based care and language, meaning men and women will have the right to request to be treated in single-sex wards.

Scotland’s Gender Bill

Ms. Badenoch said she started work on the plans two years ago in response to the Scottish National Party (SNP) bringing in the “disastrous” Gender Recognition Bill. She said that there should be “one approach throughout the United Kingdom” and her party would strip devolved governments of the powers to make their own laws on gender recognition.

Scotland’s gender self-ID reforms would have made it easier to legally identify as transgender, including without having had surgery, hormone therapy, or even a doctor’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The UK government intervened to block the bill, with the Scottish Court of Session ruling in December 2023 that the action was lawful. The SNP eventually abandoned the bill in May.

The Conservatives seeking to protect single-sex spaces in law comes after the former government—in one of its last actions before being dissolved on May 30—banned private gender clinics from prescribing puberty blockers to under-18s, after the NHS in England and health authorities in Scotland had stopped the routine prescription of the drugs.

Such reforms have come in response to the Cass Review, a damning report on transgender services which criticised NHS care providers for pushing gender-confused children onto inappropriate pathways of medical treatment that included drugs and surgery.

The review was praised by the Conservatives as well as the Labour Party, which has softened its left-progressive approach to transgender ideology in recent months. In April, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting hailed the Cass Review as a “a really important” piece of work, dropping his hardline position on gender and admitting that he no longer believes the claim that “trans women” are women.

‘Culture Wars’

In her call for people to vote for the Conservatives on July 4, Ms. Badenoch criticised her rivals in the Liberal Democrats and Labour, saying: “There are numerous examples of [Sir] Keir Starmer going round in circles on this issue. And many more of mostly Labour politicians smearing those with concerns as ’transphobic‘ or ’far-right‘, dismissing the issue as mere ’culture wars.'”

Responding to the Conservatives’ announcement, Labour said it would not amend the Equality Act if elected because it already provides sex-based protections.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks during a visit to Dover, Kent, to set out his party's plans to tackle the small boats crisis on May 10, 2024. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire)

Speaking to Times Radio, shadow defence secretary John Healey called the proposal a “distraction from the election campaign, where most people want to hear why the cost-of-living pressures are so great, what the Tories are going to do, and what Labour is going to do, to try and help make life more affordable and Britain better.”

The Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper accused the Tories of waging “phony culture wars,” telling LBC on Monday the announcement was a “cynical distraction” from their failings on the economy, cost-of-living crisis, and social care.

Ms. Cooper also said she did not think there was any need to “unpick” the Equality Act which she said “includes hard-won protections for women and for trans people and lots of other different groups with protected characteristics.”

PA Media contributed to this report.