Rishi Sunak dismissed Keir Starmer’s claim that some women can have penises and vowed to protect hard-won sex-based rights. The Prime Minister said that while compassion should be shown to people who are trans, biological sex matters.
Mr Sunak insisted it is important to protect women’s sports and spaces after clashes over whether men who switch gender should have access.
It follows a recent claim by Sir Keir that “99.9 percent of women” do not have a penis.
The PM said “yes of course” the figure is 100 percent.
He added: “We should always have compassion and understanding and tolerance for those who are thinking about their gender.
“Of course we should. We are a compassionate and understanding society and we will always remember that.
“But when it comes to these issues of protecting women’s rights and women’s spaces, I think the issue of biological sex is fundamentally important when we think about those questions.
“As a general operating principle for me, biological sex is vitally fundamentally important to these questions, we can’t forget that.
“That’s why we need to make sure when it comes to women’s health, women’s sports or spaces that we are protecting those rights.”
Labour’s deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said yesterday (ThURS) that protecting women-only spaces does not need to come at the expense of supporting transgender people.
She said: “I understand people’s concerns on both sides of the argument but I think we were the party of equality. We brought in the equality legislation. We are the best party for LGBT rights – we’ve got a history of doing that.
“We can protect women-only spaces and we can be absolutely fair to transgender people, who are the most vulnerable people in society, in supporting them for their rights and fairness, and I think we can take the public with us on this.”
