Sir Ed Davey has said that it is ‘quite clear a woman can have a penis’.
When asked to define ‘a woman’ on Nick Ferrari’s LBC breakfast show, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “the vast majority of people will have the same gender as their biological sex, but a small number won’t”
Despite stating that biological men can “quite clearly” be women, Davey justified the creation of single-sex spaces for biological women “under the Equality Act”.
Feelings
During the breakfast show phone-in, Mary from Cambridge asked the party leader “can you answer the question ‘what is a woman?’, please?”
Davey, leader of the Lib Dems since 2020, said: “the truth is, Mary, the vast majority of people whose biological sex is a woman when they were born – they feel they’re women.
“They feel their gender [is] the same as at birth, but there is a very small number of people who don’t feel like that, and the law has recognised them”.
Seeking to clarify the statement, presenter Ferrari asked, “so, a woman can have a penis?”, to which Davey replied: “Well quite clearly”.
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‘A woman can have penis’ – Sir Ed Davey
“once a full gender recognition certificate is issued to an applicant, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender, so that an applicant who was born a male would, in law, become a woman for all purposes”
Clarity
Last month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) told the Government that ‘sex’ should be clearly defined as biological sex under the Equality Act.
The EHRC’s Chairwoman – Baroness Falkner of Margravine – said that, on balance, “redefining ‘sex’” in the Equality Act “to mean biological sex would create rationalisations, simplifications, clarity and/or reductions of risk” in a number of current areas of legal dispute.
These included, Lady Falkner said, making it simpler for service providers “to make a women’s-only ward a space for biological women” and for organisers of women’s sport to exclude men who identify as women.
She also said that clarifying the definition would enable single-sex groups to restrict membership to biological women, as well as allow employers to limit certain permitted roles, such as a warden in a girls’ hostel, to biological women only.
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