Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
What is a woman? Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last five years, you’ll know that this apparently simple question has become one the most contentious in Western politics.
The answer given by any particular individual has become a proxy for his or her entire political worldview, in a similar vein to ‘leave or remain’, ‘high tax or small state’ or even, in previous centuries, papist or protestant.
Astonishingly, it is a question that has come to have serious political and legal consequences. Nicola Sturgeon was brought down by it, US state elections have been won over it, jobs have been lost over it, children’s lives have been destroyed by it. And it’s a question that is not going away, with the new Labour government committing to bring in legislation that may make it illegal to answer it honestly.
Yet it is a question that has left many conservatives floundering and fearful, missing an opportunity both to stand up for truth and win a crucial political argument.
Well, readers need flounder no more, because at 4pm on Sunday at Conservative Party Conference, a high-calibre panel of battle-hardened experts, chaired by the brilliant Camilla Tominey, stands ready to guide you through the debate, explaining how to navigate the important arguments both on the doorstep and in the media.
If you are wondering how there can be more than one possible answer to the question ‘what is a woman?’, let me explain. Clearly a woman is an adult human female, just as a car is a vehicle with four wheels and a cat is a furry animal with whiskers. The definition of ‘woman’ is an objective fact, not a matter of opinion.
Yet some have come to believe that a person’s gender or sex is determined not by their biological status, but by their internal feelings about how masculine or feminine they are and how they wish to be perceived. A man who ‘identifies as’ or wants to be a woman is, according to true believers, really a woman. A person who would prefer to be perceived as neither male nor female is ‘non-binary’. Someone who changes their mind on a daily basis is ‘gender fluid’ (keep up!).
This theory of gender – or gender ideology – was birthed in the margins of US academia in the 1960s but has found its way firmly into the mainstream of British culture, and indeed the entire Anglosphere.
Gender theory is in many ways laughable. Attempts to add increasingly bizarre gender identities to lists of apparently marginalised groups has spawned some hilarious Twitter memes. But sadly the idea that biological sex doesn’t matter – and that identity is something that is ‘felt’ rather than given – has had many alarming and sinister consequences.
The most well-publicised victims of gender ideology have been children, thousands of whom in this country alone have been put on physically ruinous medicalised paths to ‘gender transition’. The scandal of the Tavistock Clinic in London, exposed by courageous journalists and the paediatrician Dr Hillary Cass, demonstrates how a niche idea that gains political support can brainwash even intelligent professionals into causing serious harm to vulnerable children.
Women too have been enormously disadvantaged by gender ideology; if a man can, by claiming he is a woman, enter women’s toilets, changing rooms, sports and prisons, then all the laws and societal protections that have been built up over centuries to protect women and girls are meaningless.
The other important casualties of gender ideology have been truth and free speech. In many workplaces it has become a sackable offence to state the widely accepted fact that biological sex is immutable, as the courageous Maya Forstater – who will be speaking on our panel – found out to her cost.
It’s hard to overstate just what is at stake if conservatives can’t win the argument over sex and gender. The safety of women and children, the integrity of our criminal justice system, even truth itself are threatened by the advance of gender theory.
Yet the impacts of this radical ideology cannot be reversed through a few well-placed comment pieces in ConHome and a concerted effort to ridicule its adherents (important though these tactics are). Conservatives first need to understand how gender ideology has become embedded in our law (through the 2004 Gender Recognition Act and the 2010 Equality Act) if we are going to devise a successful strategy to reclaim our institutions.
Those who dismiss these issues as mere ‘culture wars’ do so at their peril. Conservatism is a philosophy based on observable truths about the world and human nature, and the desire to pass on those truths from one generation to the next. If we erode the foundational principles of civilisation, such as the difference between male and female, the concept of truth as fact not feeling, then our well-rehearsed arguments over tax rates or government efficiency become peripheral and irrelevant.
If you want to know what a woman is – and why Conservatives must be able to answer the most contentious question of our age – please join us on Sunday. All identities welcome.
