Being able to self-identify one’s gender has been introduced in a number of countries in Europe in recent years. Until about 2012 or 2013, in many countries in Europe, if someone wanted to transition, they were forced to be sterilised. That happened in countries such as Belgium, Croatia, Sweden, Denmark and France, but we did not have forced sterilisation in this country, as it is a grave human rights violation. A lot of the laws on gender self-identification were made to remedy the grave human rights violations that had been going on.
In Denmark, where there are 6 million people and self-identification of gender was introduced in 2014, there are already cases of people who self-identified as women—I am not talking about people whose gender identity genuinely does not match the sex that they were born in—going into what were previously sex-segregated spaces, which are now women’s spaces, and raping people. There are already such cases in Denmark and Norway, which have populations of around 6 million people.
Until Ireland brought in self-identification law, it did not force people to be sterilised, as it just did not recognise that there was such a thing as trans. In Ireland, sex segregation remains in prisons and schools, and it is based on biological sex, not gender identification.
In Malta, where self-identification has come in, trans women who go to prison have separate showering and sleeping facilities, and female prison guards can choose whether they wish to search them.
The issues are really complex, and nobody is getting them completely right or fully understanding them.
In order to know what our prison needs are, we need to know how many trans-identifying women there are in the population, and we cannot know that by conflating sex and gender in the census. To know about the needs of refuges, girl guides or whatever, we need to know the numbers of the populations. We need to meet their needs but also those of women and girls.
In England and Wales, two women every week are killed by a current or former partner. We need to think about the needs of women and girls—as a protected characteristic under sex—as much as about the needs of trans individuals under the gender identity question. Very often, conversations focus on trans-identifying individuals, which is important because they are vulnerable, and forget completely the massive vulnerability of 50 per cent of the population, whose sex is a protected characteristic for a reason.