A new grassroots campaign in the United Kingdom asks candidates and elected officials to answer the question, “What is a woman?” The responses will be recorded and shared online.
“This is about calmly giving MPs [Members of Parliament] the chance to clarify their position, on camera,” the campaign shared on Twitter. “This is about transparency and honesty.”
The campaign said on Twitter that its website is “coming soon.”
An “ambassador” of the campaign is Sharron Davies, a record-breaking swimmer and Olympic medalist, who opposes allowing males to compete in women’s sports divisions. Davies co-authored a letter to the International Olympic Committee in 2019, which she described as calling for “more research into residual benefits of transition in transgender sport.” She co-authored the book Unfair Play: The Battle For Women’s Sport, which was released this summer.
“The idea behind the site is just to offer transparency from MPs & candidates as we lead up to an election,” the British swimmer shared on Twitter. General elections in the U.K. are usually held every five years. There are 650 Members of Parliament.
“We need transparency not deliberate confusion. If an MP doesn’t know what a woman is, they can’t fight for women,” Davies wrote on social media. “Women are not an outfit or a feeling they are a biological sex that has for ever had to fight for equality, opportunity & safe spaces.”
The percent of British people who describe themself as “not at all prejudiced” against transgender people has fallen from 82 percent to 64 percent since 2019, according to the latest “British Social Attitudes” report by the National Center for Social Research.
“I’ll save them the bother of doorstepping me,” Kate Osborne, a Member of Parliament affiliated with the left-leaning Labour Party, wrote on Twitter. “Yes some women have a penis.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a member of the Conservative Party, said in a 2023 interview with Piers Morgan that a woman is an “adult human female.”
Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer told the Sunday Times in an April 2023 interview that “For 99.9 percent of women, it is completely biological . . . and of course they haven’t got a penis.” Starmer said in a July 2023 radio show that “a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up.”
The Labour Campaign for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Rights called for MP Rosie Duffield to be suspended from the party in July 2021 due to her alleged “a pattern of LGBT-phobic behaviour” on social media.
Duffield faced accusations of “transphobia” in August 2020 for stating that “only women have a cervix.” Duffield wrote in a September 2021 Twitter thread that she holds both “feminist and gender critical beliefs,” meaning that she supports “the rights of all trans people to live freely as they choose” but does not “accept self-ID as a passport for male-bodied biological men to enter protected spaces for biological women.”
The definition of “woman” has similarly troubled Americans politicians and judges.
Daily Wire conservative commentator Matt Walsh starred in the 2022 documentary What is a Woman? Representative Mark Takano (D., Calif.), the first openly gay person of color elected to Congress, was featured in the movie, although he walked out of his interview with Walsh.
Now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was unable to define “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, saying that “I’m not a biologist.”