David John Maclean, Baron Blencathra, has urged Boris Johnson to “stand up to the small, militant, transgender fascist lobby” and for “the rights of 32 million real women” in a House of Lords debate.
Lord Blencathra, who served as a government whip under the late prime minister Margaret Thatcher and as a Minister of State under her successor John Major, urged the current Conservative Party leader to take a stand in a parliamentary debate on whether the government should act to ensure “at least half of the communal changing or toilet facilities offered in public buildings are reserved for women only.”
The 66-year-old life peer told the Upper House his “blunt message to the Government… is this: when will you stand up to the small, militant, transgender fascist lobby and say that the rights of 32 million real women and 800,000 wheelchair users are more important than the rights of tens of thousands who identify as transgender?”
As a wheelchair user himself, Lord Blencathra said he was perturbed by what he sees as an inordinate focus on providing facilities for people who identify with the opposite sex, even to the detriment of the safety of biological women and girls, while there are still “over 70,000 public buildings in the UK that wheelchair users cannot get into, let alone have the luxury of deciding which toilet to use.”
“As every doctor and even first-year medical student knows, there are only two biological sexes, male and female, with a tiny number of people who are known as genuine hermaphrodites, male pseudo-hermaphrodites or female pseudo-hermaphrodites,” Blencathra insisted.
He added that while genuinely intersex persons “deserves respect and support”, sex is “biological and binary and is not a social construct.”
The peer said he did accept that people who identify with the opposite sex should be able to change their gender following a medical diagnosis and supervised transition, but that the government must not “permit the absurdity of self-identification, with the huge loss in freedom and safety for women that that would entail.”
“I say ‘absurdity’ but it is more of an obscenity, because we have the reality, as seen in Answers to Parliamentary Questions tabled by me, of male rapist convicts suddenly telling the Prison Service that they are identifying as women and our useless, incompetent, politically correct Prison Service immediately transferring them to female prison wings where they have raped and sexually assaulted real women prisoners,” he claimed.
“What a wonderful sexual predators’ charter.”
