My Lords, I am glad to have had the opportunity, like the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, to bin the speech that I was going to make and to welcome the Minister’s comments. I also was glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for whom I have huge respect and who has done an enormous amount, has courageously spoken out on issues of discrimination. I was glad to hear her speak and that the case that she has argued has been put forward and heard.
For me, the message that has come from this debate is that it is tremendously easy to find ourselves in a horrible and destructive polarisation whereby we feel that we have to be on one side of an argument, at an extreme, and where it is difficult to make accommodations, understand and work through how we do the task that the Equality Act sets out of balancing and calibrating conflicting—or at least not obviously easy to reconcile—rights.
I have not received a lot of correspondence since my speech on Monday but I have had three letters from trans men who were worried that their rights were being taken away by this change of language. That would have been a serious issue. It now appears, unlike the argument put forward originally, that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, was right and that no rights would be taken away from people whose sex at birth was female but who transitioned and gave birth. That is important because however small a minority is,
we should protect their rights and the services that we give them. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that one has to be on one side or another and it is not possible to accommodate in language—and language does matter—the subtleties of the issues raised. As I said at Second Reading, that process is not aided by legislating in haste. More consideration might not have got us into a situation in which people on both sides of this argument, if I may phrase it like that, have found themselves subject to abuse. I sometimes despair at the quality and cruelty of public discourse in current times.
I therefore take lessons out of this. I am an unreconstructed old feminist and of course I have been worried by some of the developments in language, and those seeping into issues regarding women’s spaces and women’s rights. That is not because I believe in any way that trans people are a threat to women. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, is absolutely right about that. There is no evidence or reason to believe that. I firmly believe that we should accommodate, support and be kind and sensitive in our language to those people. However, I also believe that we have fallen from those standards in our services for women recently and that today is important for drawing that line in the sand.
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I will say one other thing. I was very struck by a letter in the Times the day after the publicity about the Brighton NHS trust’s change of language, which was, in my view, ludicrous but well intentioned. In many instances, it is not the communities and individuals who are themselves affected by these issues who take an extreme line on language; it is those who choose to be their advocates and take extreme positions. I end by quoting that letter. It read:
“Such attempts to control language may backfire spectacularly on transgender people like me as the public tires of being told what they are expected to think. If even the facts of life are deemed to be transphobic, then perhaps transphobia has lost all meaning.”
We must be careful with our language and respectful of minorities. We have made an important stand but it should not be seen as having defeated anyone, least of all transgender people. It should be seen as a victory for women’s rights.