Top UK official joins trans debate
British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab has rejected arguments by a conservative think tank that biological males identifying as women posed an increasingly serious threat to female prison inmates. He also dismissed the idea that a woman can be born with a penis, stating that this was “obviously” not the case, The Sun reported on Monday.
Raab’s remarks came in response to a report by the influential conservative think-tank Policy Exchange, which claimed the British justice system was putting women in harm’s way by allowing men to declare themselves women.
The report, penned by assistant professor at Coventry University Maureen O’Hara, argued that police, judges and prisons should put biological sex before gender. Otherwise, the author said, male offenders could cheat the system by declaring themselves transwomen.
Such people would then be searched by female officers and kept in women’s prisons, potentially posing a threat to other inmates. Meanwhile the public would receive skewed data about crime in the country as police would, for example, record male rapists as female, the report argued.
The deputy PM defended the standing policies on transgender individuals by bringing up the low incidence of the worst-case scenario incidents, like rape of a female inmate by a self-identifying transwoman, The Sun reported. He said the last such case happened in 2019, adding: “I think we’ve got the right approach.”
But when asked if a woman can have a penis he said: “It’s obvious a woman cannot be born with a penis.”
The latter observation by the Tory politician appears to be a commentary on the debate on trans issues in the Labour Party. MP Stella Creasy stated in an interview with The Telegraph last week that some women are born with penises, referring to transwomen.
She took a stance amid a larger struggle within the party over the definition of what a woman is. Critics, like author JK Rowling, say Labour leadership is undermining women’s rights by blurring the line between sex and gender in the name of protecting trans rights.
