A police investigation into a ‘sticker protest’ along Crosby beach in Merseyside has been described as “chilling”.
Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning, feminist campaigner Dr Julia Long defended the rights of women to declare that men are men – even if they say they are women.
She said she was amazed Merseyside Police were looking into the stunt, calling it “staggering”.
‘Biological fact’
Feminist group Liverpool ReSisters opposes Government plans to allow people to legally change sex by ‘self-declaration’.
To raise awareness of how self-declaration could lead to the violation of women’s privacy in single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, they have distributed crude stickers bearing the slogan “women don’t have penises”.
Dr Long said she failed to see how the message on the stickers was in any way controversial: “That is a simple statement of biological fact.”
The police investigation into the stickers, she said, is “a very chilling indication of what we are now, increasingly, not allowed to say”.
Changing rooms
Dr Long continued by saying the stickers were particularly effective in raising awareness of the issue of self-declaration.
She explained that when she recently went swimming, she was keenly aware that if Government plans go ahead it would be almost impossible to remove a naked man from the women’s changing rooms.
Also appearing on the programme was a man calling himself Vicky Lee.
He said men who identify as women are among many “different kinds of women”, which he said also included “lesbians” and “angry women”, and defended the right of men to use women’s changing facilities.
Self-declaration
In July, Theresa May launched a consultation on removing safeguards to legally change sex.
Currently, to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate, an applicant must have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and have lived as if a member of the opposite sex for two years.
But Mrs May says she wants to see “a process that is more streamlined and de-medicalised – because being trans should never be treated as an illness”.
This suggests the Prime Minister is in favour of a move towards ‘self-declaration’ – where a man can legally change sex simply by saying he is a woman, and vice versa.