Sarah Owen, MP (Labour) for Luton North was elected Chair of the parliamentary Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) on 11^th September 2024. The following morning, she was a guest on Woman’s Hour, presented by Anita Rani.  

Woman’s Hour was hardly quick to pick up on women’s legitimate concerns regarding the threats posed by the Gender Recognition Act, and transgender identity ideology more generally, to women’s sex based rights and protections. In fact, the BBC issued Woman’s Hours’s longest serving presenter, Jenni Murray, with an impartiality warning after a piece she had written for The Sunday Times Magazine (in March 2017) addressed whether men who had undergone ‘ a sex change operation ‘ (more accurately  described as gender affirmation surgery, because, quite simply, people cannot change sex) were different from ‘real women’. As Murray later wrote, ‘ I was roundly ticked off publicly and informed that I would not be allowed to chair any discussions on the trans question or proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.’ Refusing to be silenced, Murray left the BBC just over three years later. Woman’s Hour’s refusal to tackle the issue increasingly undermined the programme’s claim to address ‘topical issues’ and slowly the embarrassing lacuna was filled. When Woman’s Hour presenter Anita Rani interviewed Owen, whilst some of us might have liked a more robust challenge to Owen’s responses, at least relevant questions were asked about the some of the issues in the clash between women’s and transgender rights.

Owen expressed sadness that people’s fears and concerns had been boiled down to body parts. This interpretation is her own and way behind the current state of debate. It is a central feminist position that women are more than our body parts. Of course, we are. The feminist position is that women’s bodies should not and need not define the entirety or scope of our lives, that our sex and socially prescribed sex roles are not the same. This is far from saying that we do not share the material reality of a sexed body.  

Owen was one of 452 MPs and 129 MSPs who were sent a complimentary copy of my book, Defending Women’s Spaces in a campaign by Woman’s Place UK and nia. The book makes clear that the needs of women in relation to single-sex spaces go way beyond matters of body parts. Of course, being sent a book is not the same as reading it, and if she hasn’t done so already, I’d suggest that Sarah spends some time with the book and considers some of the issues I raise from the perspective of someone who, for 34 years, has been involved in the provision of specialist services for women who have been subjected to men’s violence. Sarah, if you’ve misplaced your copy, could I further suggest that you buy one or even borrow someone else’s? Even if I say it myself, the book has important things to say about the importance of single sex services in particular for women victim-survivors of men’s violence.  

When asked what a woman is, Owen for some reason found herself unable to answer the question. Instead, she said ‘somebody that is going to be paid less than their male counterparts, somebody that is going to be less safe walking down the streets and somebody that faces more barriers in the workplace, education and health sector. These are not examples of what a woman is, they are examples of sex-inequality. They are examples of how the sex-hierarchy operates in patriarchal societies. Indeed, they are issues that we might suppose fall within the remit of the WESC. If we managed to eradicate all these examples of sex inequality, the biological category of women would still exist. But we need to be able to identify women if we are to show how we are discriminated against.

I was surprised to hear Owen say that most of the debate around the clash between women’s sex-based rights and protections had happened without ‘transwomen’s’ voices. Perhaps she hasn’t read the 2016 WESC Transgender Equality Report. I opened my book with a reference to this report. It included the nonsense claim that each of us is assigned sex at birth and quoted a newspaper article citing the disputed ‘sobering and distressing fact that in UK surveys of trans people about half of young people and a third of adults report that they have attempted suicide’. The report included quotes from the Scottish Transgender Alliance recommending the removal of the single-sex exceptions, from Galop, an LGBT anti-abuse charity, which claimed that transgender people are currently at serious risk of harm by being excluded from sexual and domestic violence and abuse services and one Mridul Wadhwa, who is quoted saying: ‘I am disappointed to think that someone has the right to refuse work to me and others like me in my sector [the sexual and domestic violence and abuse sector] just because they think that I might not be a woman.’  And we all know how his appointment turned out, don’t we?

Far from the voices of trans identified males not having been heard, the government announced that the Gender Recognition Act was to be reviewed following recommendations of the WESC report. The committee, then chaired by Maria Miller MP, had called 20 people (outside of MPs) as witnesses to the inquiry which preceded the report. Kathleen Stock summarised those who were called as witnesses thus: eleven of the twenty represented trans activist organisations, while the remaining nine were relatively neutral experts, though some of these were also trans themselves. No women’s groups were called to give evidence, though some had made written submissions, and neither was anyone who had voiced concerns about transitioning. In fact, one of the reasons that Woman’s Place UK was founded in 2017 was to help ensure that women’s voices were heard – as it was ours, not those of males who identified as transgender or organisations servicing their interests, which had been excluded. In addition, when I gave evidence to the WESC about whether specialist providers of services for women  who had been subjected to men’s violence understood the provisions of the Equality Act regarding single-sex spaces, one of the other two people interviewed was a trans identified man called Diana James. Perhaps it is understandable that the day after her appointment as Chair was announced, Owen was not familiar with the history of the committee, including the highly significant report that it had published eight years earlier. But this gap in her knowledge should not have resulted in her making a claim whichwas quite the opposite of the history of the committee that she now chairs. It hardly suggests that she is capable of hearing women’s concerns or recognising when we are not heard by others. And, I’d add, the ‘say what you want to think is true because it suits your narrative regardless of its basis in fact’ is entirely consistent with the input of transgender identity ideology advocates: their false claims about suicide, denial of the harms of puberty blockers, denial of the extent of the medicalisation and sterilisation of minors, exaggeration of the levels of serious harm and violence to persons with transgender identities in the UK and so on.

Owen also claims that polarised views mean that we haven’t seen any progress in addressing the conflict between women’s sex-based rights and protections and transgender identify ideology and she bemoaned the lack of respectful debate. Again, she is quite wrong. Feminist interventions have been largely respectful but most of all she is wrong to deny women’s gains. As Professor Jo Phoenix summarised ‘the count so far (of employment tribunals involving secular gender critical claimants and including full admissions of liability as wins’) is: ‘12 wins (admission of liability + claims upheld @ ET/EAT), two settled by agreement, two ongoing appeals, two unsuccessful and one dismissed at preliminary hearing stage (ruled out of time and/or claimant did not have employment status)’. This, Phoenix explains is in the context of less than five percent of belief discrimination claims winning at hearing & around 15-20% being unsuccessful at hearing in the last fifteen years while we (those of us who understand that sex is a material fact and refuse to pretend otherwise) are winning at a rate of 78 percent with three percent being unsuccessful. There are many progressions outside courtrooms too and of course the battles fought inside the courtroom themselves have implications outside it.

Quite simply, women have refused to be silenced and we continue to make gains. We will not let our rights be given away. We will not let demands that we ‘be kind’ prevent us from fighting to protect our interests. The chair of the Women and Equalities Committee is only one member of the committee and I hope others on the committee will ensure that issues are examined and robust challenges are made. I recognise that the remit of the committee is women and (other) equality and inequality issues. But surely there’s an indication in the name of the committee that women’s interests should not be ignored or diminished. And sadly, it doesn’t fill me with confidence that the new chair can’t even define what a woman is.