Labour’s women and equalities minister supported transgender people being able to declare their own gender.
Anneliese Dodds, who has replaced Kemi Badenoch, backed proposals that would have allowed anybody to acquire a gender recognition certificate if they wanted one.
Gender self-identification was official Labour policy under both Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer.
The now-Prime Minister only scrapped the policy after the backlash to Nicola Sturgeon’s failed attempt to introduce it in Scotland in early 2023 via the Gender Recognition Act.
Upon being appointed shadow minister for women and equalities in September 2021, Ms Dodds made it clear that she supported self-ID, which would revoke the existing requirement for a formal medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
In a speech at the Labour Conference, she said that a Labour government would acknowledge “that trans rights are human rights” and “reform the Gender Recognition Act to enable a process for self-identification while continuing to support the 2010 Equalities Act”.
Sir Keir had chosen to uphold the Corbyn-era position and, that same month, attacked Rosie Duffield, Labour MP, after she said only women have a cervix.
It formed part of a broader package of pro-transgender measures about which Ms Dodds spoke out in favour.
In November 2021, she said Labour would change the law to ensure tougher sentences for anti-trans hate crimes.
A few months later, in March 2022, Ms Dodds failed to define what a woman was in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
“I think it does depend what the context is,” she said, prompting a backlash from gender-critical campaigners – those who emphasise the importance of biological sex.
The stilted exchange was republicised by JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, following Ms Dodds’ appointment to the Government.
The MP for Oxford East had also been firmly supportive of a complete ban on conversion therapy. Speaking in February 2023, she vowed to “break new ground by introducing a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy”.
Later that same year she told the Labour Party conference: “We will deliver where the Conservatives have failed by bringing in a full, no-loopholes, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy.”
Critics such as Dr Hilary Cass have warned that such a policy could prevent therapists from questioning children who believe they are trans, which her landmark review earlier this year said was “essential”.
In March that year, however, Labour signalled a major change in transgender policy by ditching self-ID in response to the backlash to the SNP’s Gender Reform Act, which was ultimately blocked by Westminster in what was branded a “humiliating defeat”.
That July, Ms Dodds wrote in The Guardian that the existing sex change process was “intrusive, outdated and humiliating” and that it needed “modernising” – without specifying what exactly that would involve.
In August, she used an interview with the i newspaper to say that Labour would remove “indignities” in the process that she described as “very problematic”, while maintaining that single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act would not be overridden.
In the run-up to the election campaign in May, Ms Dodds branded the gender transition process “dehumanising”.
“We believe everyone should be treated with dignity and respect,” she said. “We want to see the process for gender recognition modernised, while protecting single-sex spaces for biological women.
“This means stripping out the futile and dehumanising parts of the process for obtaining a gender recognition certificate, while retaining important safeguards.”
Labour has proposed that the law will be changed so that gender recognition certificates only require the signature of one GP – not the panel of doctors and lawyers that is currently used.
Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary who is technically Ms Dodds’ superior as women and equalities minister, has also been an outspoken advocate of transgender policy reform.
In May, she accused Mrs Badenoch of loving “nothing more than a culture war” in response to the then women and equalities minister’s claim that some girls were getting urinary tract infections from not wanting to use gender-neutral lavatories in schools.
She also declined to commit to keeping the Conservatives’ new sex education guidance, which says that it should not be taught earlier than the age of nine and urges schools not to teach contested gender ideology.
“I do think it’s important that children have a wide understanding about their place in the world and understand that families come in different shapes and sizes, and understand issues around relationships,” Ms Phillipson told The Telegraph.
Last month, the MP for Houghton and Sunderland South suggested that Labour will also ditch guidelines banning children from being taught that there are more than two genders.
Asked three times if she would keep the ban or ditch it, Ms Phillipson refused to answer directly but said: “There are trans people within society and their existence should be recognised.”
She was also criticised for refusing eight times to answer whether a biological male should be able to use a women’s lavatory during a radio interview with LBC.
Presenter Nick Ferrari then presented a specific scenario about a trans woman with a penis needing to use a public lavatory in a restaurant, asking: “The trans woman with a penis would use which lavatory?”
Ms Phillipson repeatedly suggested that businesses should provide “a range of different options”, even when Mr Ferrari specified that the hypothetical restaurant only had two options – male and female lavatories.
While Ms Phillipson will formally hold the women and equalities portfolio because it has to be held by someone of Cabinet rank, Ms Dodds will be the de facto minister and attend Cabinet.
