The Telegraph - Candidates who sidestep the gender issue are not fit for high office

Candidates who sidestep the gender issue are not fit for high office

We need a Prime Minister who is prepared to speak up for women's rights

NIKKI DA COSTA11 July 2022 • 12:20pm Nikki da Costa

If you want to be Prime Minister, you need to be able to answer the question ‘What is a woman?’ It’s not a ‘gotcha question’, it is a litmus test for honesty. Are you willing to acknowledge why this question has become important? Are you willing to say what you think, to make the arguments, and to keep making them? Can you handle difficult conversations with the nation? Will fear of the next day’s headlines shape your thinking, or your thinking shape the headlines?

How you handle that question, with sensitivity and respect to trans people and to women, provides crucial insight to how you will run No 10. I am deeply cautious about any candidate that brushes the question aside, arguing there are more important issues. Doing so is disingenuous. The economic and systemic challenges are significant. I fear for the winter and what ordinary households will face. There are no short-term fixes and the next prime minister will have to make tough choices regarding inflation, food and energy supply.

But government doesn’t stand still while attention is focussed elsewhere, the Whitehall policy machine will continue to churn. Things get slipped out, (and quietly slipped in), problems become entrenched. Serving two prime ministers, I saw how easy it was for the Prime Minister’s and ministers’ attention to narrow to the crisis of the day. The last thing we

need now is a No 10 which wakes up each morning and asks ‘How did this happen?!’.

It is the issues on which a candidate is silent that I will therefore worry about. If they are silent, there will be silence within government. Options not considered, questions kept off the policy agenda, stakeholders not invited to the policy table, issues unaddressed.

No candidate should be allowed to sidestep the gender issue, since in Whitehall there is a long list of live issues: how to preserve fair competition in sport; the imminent issuing of guidance to schools on how to support trans-identifying children; depoliticisation of the NHS and Gender Identity services; and how to respond to Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill with its cross-border implications. New ministers will be asked to give a steer as to how the civil service should proceed.

The cynic in me worries that ministers may be bounced into quick decisions. I would not expect a candidate to know the detail on all these issues, but I would expect them to have a view on three of them. A recent survey by More in Common found that the public were kind, compassionate and keen to find solutions, but only 19% believed transwomen should compete in women-only sports. Do candidates agree that where biological sex bestows competitive advantage, women and girls have the right to take part in female-only competitive sporting activities at all levels in order to maintain fairness and to protect their physical safety?

A majority of Britons believe physical medical intervention towards transition should not start below the age of 18. I want to know if a candidate is aware of the steep increase in young people, most of whom are teenage girls, experiencing gender distress - discomfort with their bodies and biological sex – and if they are honest enough and brave enough to risk the wrath of trans activists by asking whether something else is driving these children to feel this way, particularly as medical treatment may follow.

When women are vulnerable - physically because they must undress or sleep, or emotionally, because they have suffered trauma and abuse – does the candidate recognise their right to same-sex spaces as valid?

In short, can we afford a potential new Prime Minister doing a Keir Starmer?

A new Prime Minister will be chosen not through the trial of a general election, but by MPs and members. Within two weeks the field will narrow to two. Now is the time to ask and answer difficult questions. Soon it will be too late.

Nikki da Costa was Director of Legislative Affairs at Downing Street