The leftist local government in Wales is preparing to legally recognise biological male transgender people as “women” according to leaked draft legislation intended to increase female representation in politics.
A draft of the upcoming Gender Quotas Bill set to be introduced by the leftist Welsh Labour Party government in Cardiff seeks to mandate that half of any list of potential parliamentary candidates presented to the party membership must be women.
However, according to The Telegraph, the legislation said that “transgender women” — biological males who profess to reject the sex they were born as — will be included in the quota for female candidate lists.
A transgender person was defined as “a person who is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning [their] sex to female by changing physiological or other attributes of sex”.
The plans have been criticised by the UK government’s Welsh Secretary, David TC Davies, who said: “One of my greatest fears is that the plan will have a detrimental impact on women’s rights across our country.
“Those rights have been hard fought for and I fear could now be undermined by the Labour-run Welsh Government’s ill-thought policy.”
Similar attempts to expand the definition of women in Scotland — when then Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon put forward legislation to allow biological males to be housed in female-only prisons — were blocked by the British government in London.
Leftist Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford has long backed the idea that “transgender women are women,” previously arguing that the government should “find ways of promoting understanding rather than conflict, and to demonstrate respect rather than to look for exclusion … to me, inclusivity is absolutely what we should be aiming for here.”
However, opponents of the encroachment on female rights and spaces, have criticised the local Welsh Labour Party government, including the Welsh co-ordinator of the Women’s Rights Network Cathy Larkman, who argued that it “undermines the rights of half of the population of Wales”.
“They are hijacking legislation that should benefit women and increase female participation in public life in order to embed a toxic and misogynist ideology,” she said.
Larkman also argued that the devolved Welsh government does not have the legal authority to make such determinations, saying that they are merely “making a calculated risk that no one will oppose them.”
A spokeswoman for the Welsh government claimed that the leaked draft was not the final version of the bill, however, she did not specify whether the section on transgender people would be changed or not.
“Our proposed model for quotas is designed to maximise the chances of achieving a Senedd comprised of at least 50 per cent women. Work is ongoing on the Bill,” she said.