Women’s rights in the Labour Party

The crux of the controversy is over women’s rights: who should hold them, and on what basis. This makes it imperative that women are heard. Yet women’s views have been censored and subject to attack. This has raised the temperature and created a climate in which the respectful, evidence-based dialogue we need to have has been impossible.

It is important that Labour leadership clearly condemns all bullying and intimidation of women and those who would enter the debate and discussions around sex and gender. We need an unequivocal statement from party leadership affirming the party’s ongoing determination to; defend and expand women’s rights; ensure women can contribute to discussion and debate on policy and ensure members are fairly considered for officer and political roles without discrimination and harassment on the basis of legitimate opinions regarding women’s rights and the nature of sex oppression

Sex and Gender: Key Points

Sex is fixed and dimorphic: male and female are biological sexes determined at conception and recorded at birth: it is not possible to change sex, though cosmetic surgery and hormone treatment may help an individual to resemble the opposite sex.

Gender is the set of social and cultural norms and stereotypes about how women and men ‘should’ behave: it is socially constructed, coercively imposed, changes over time, and differs between societies.

Gender identity, which has no legal definition and is undefined in the Labour Party rulebook, is an innate sense of maleness or femaleness (or both or neither) that some individuals experience: individuals are entitled to believe in gender identity but it is unfalsifiable (unscientific) and at odds with what feminists have argued for decades, that gender roles are not innate but are socially and coercively imposed.

Women are a sex class: born female, with sexed bodies that have implications for how we live our lives, and also raised female, as the subordinated group in a sexist society: being a woman is about both
biology and social experience.

Because sex, gender and gender identity are different, we need clear language to talk about women’s sex-based rights: we need to collect data on the basis of sex in order to identify the extent of sex-based
oppression and differentials, to identify and implement measures to address sexism, and to calibrate the success or otherwise of those measures

‘Self-identification’ (self-ID) of sex is based on the sex-denialist belief that sex is no longer politically relevant, that gender identity overrides sex in categorising an individual as a man, woman or something else, and that women’s rights, protections and provisions should be extended to any man who feels, believes or says he is a woman.

The Conflict of Rights: Key Points
Women’s rights, and the rights of transgender-identifying people, are not always or invariably in conflict: in many places, sex does not matter.

The Equality Act provides single-sex exceptions for providers of services where sex matters (e.g. hospitals, prisons, domestic violence refuges, hostels, changing and toilet accommodation): these exceptions are on the basis of sex, not gender identity.

Self-ID makes enforcing the single-sex exceptions impracticable: providers cannot distinguish between visibly male people who identify as transgender and those who do not. A space provided on the basis of self-declared gender identity is not single-sex.

Self-ID also means that resources intended to help women redress the sexism they have experienced since birth cannot be reserved for them: extending measures (e.g. all-women shortlists) on the basis of gender identity means that those for whom the measures were intended (women who have been disadvantaged from birth) become less likely to receive them.

Data collection that conflates sex, gender, and gender identity creates confusion (e.g. in the criminal justice system) that skews statistics.

Losing the word ‘woman’ to describe women as a sex class makes it impossible to discuss the particularities of women’s experiences: it has led to de-humanising of women as (e.g.) ‘birthing people’, ‘cervix-havers’, ‘menstruators’.

Conflicts of rights are not new and the Equality Act recognises they can arise: where they do, respectful, evidence-based discussion involving all groups concerned is needed to explore and address them, and find policy solutions.

Creating a Climate Conducive to Discussion: Key Points

Sex and gender are confused and conflated in Party governance at all levels.

Women who seek to discuss or defend our sex-based rights are subject to knee-jerk accusations of transphobia and bigotry, and told we have no right to participate in discussion. Women have been victimised in the Labour Party for defending women’s rights on the basis of sex: we have an extensive dossier of women denied Party membership, removed from candidate panels, disinvited as speakers at meetings, disciplined etc.

Lesbians have found it especially hard to be heard: the acronym ‘LGBTQ+’ tends to obscure the specific experiences of lesbians, and those women who consider themselves same-sex (not same-gender-identity)-attracted are targeted rather than represented by the Labour LGBTQ+ ‘community’.

Labour’s policy to support self-ID has not been properly discussed or formally decided anywhere in the Party, and its potential impact on other protected characteristics, including sex, religion and belief, has
not been assessed.

Labour’s partnerships with discredited corporate lobby groups Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, which promote sex denialism and a policy of ‘no-debate’, means that members, staff and politicians have been trained to believe that women’s rights must be held on the basis of gender identity, and that any discussion of the continued relevance of sex is trans-exclusionary.

Beyond the Labour Party, public understanding of sex and gender, and of the implications of self-ID for women’s rights, is growing. As the Common Ground report showed, the UK public is supportive of trans-identifying people being able to live with dignity and without harassment, and wants conflicts of rights to be addressed and resolved. Current Labour policies, including on conversion practices and non-binary identities, are behind the curve, stuck in the era and language of ‘no-debate’. We will only move forward, as a party, when genuine evidence-based dialogue, in language everyone can
understand, becomes possible. We can help with this.

Resetting the dial on no-debate will take commitment and a clear steer from the top. Without clear leadership, the party will continue to lose ground on women’s rights – ground that should belong to Labour but is daily being ceded to the Conservatives. This needs to be reversed.

Labour Women’s Declaration Working Group 12/07/2022