Labour will ban transgender women from all-women shortlists after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman, The Times has learnt.
The party’s ruling body will vote on Tuesday on measures to scrap rules that allowed its positive action schemes to be operated on the basis of self-identification, as Britain’s equality regulator is expected to say lavatories, changing rooms and shelters should be run on the basis of biological sex.
Separately, a report prepared for Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) said that it was “not legally defensible to continue to apply [positive action] measures on a basis other than relating [to] individuals who were biological women at birth only”.
The report said the Supreme Court judgment affected who could attend Labour’s women’s conference, who could stand for the role of women’s officer and sex or gender quotas.
The committee also said that putting on this year’s women’s conference would come with additional security risks, given the attention on the judgment, and would be likely to attract protests. It said there was a “significant risk of legal challenge” and there would also be a “political risk” that it could overshadow the rest of Labour’s national conference. The report therefore recommended it be postponed.
Maya Forstater, the chief executive of the charity Sex Matters, said it was “good news that the Labour Party NEC is being urged to accept that women and men are, and always have been, two biological sexes”
She said: “This basic truth must be acknowledged and implemented within the infrastructure of the Labour Party. However, the suggestion that the right thing to do is to postpone the women’s conference rather than simply running the event as it was always intended to be — for women — is simply outrageous.”
She added: “There would be no good reason to postpone the planned conference just because it is for women, as defined in the Equality Act. This is direct discrimination against women in the Labour Party.”
Source: Labour to ban transgender women from all-female shortlists