Don’t ask Sunak about women having penises – it’s not his job to tell you

Party political debate becomes inflamed when the most intimate of beliefs, and the most personal of interests, are the subject of low-grade emotive argument

I’ve recently been re-reading Alistair Horne’s masterly biography of Harold Macmillan, who served as prime minister from 1957 to 1963. Macmillan, as stylish a fellow as our current leaders are dull, was, in effect, brought down by the permissive revolution of the early 1960s, and the licentious activities of one of his cabinet ministers, Jack Profumo.

The last Edwardian in Downing Street was simply unable to comprehend what was happening in the world around him, and I’m not sure the present occupant of No 10 is all that in touch either.

At any rate, I didn’t think I’d live to see the day when the prime minister would be talking about penises in a television interview. I did also wonder what Supermac would make of it all. He’d probably wonder aloud why Sunak wasn’t talking about pensions instead, as was the norm in his day.

Maybe some of us are still a bit too prudish about such things to confront the question of women’s penises, so to speak. Sunak dispatched the issue as rapidly and cleanly as he could. He didn’t give the impression that he’d given it that much thought.

You could see the PM’s assertion that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises as an exercise in heuristic technique – cutting through the complexities with a simple, short answer – but I think his statement was more about politics than anything else.

Any other answer would invite all manner of distracting supplementaries, and the last thing this technocratic premier wants or needs is to spend his remaining time in office discussing trans rights. Look what it did for Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon!

Earlier this month, Starmer suggested that as many as one in a thousand women have penises, telling The Sunday Times: “For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological ... and of course, they haven’t got a penis.” Apart from anything else it’s a political minefield, because there’s no easy “right” answer, in the sense that people will instinctively side with you.

Sunak took the simplest way out, adding that biological sex “really matters”. Thus he neatly sidestepped the issues of gender, trans rights, and the practical implications of gender equality. It was tidy, even if he left all the socially important issues completely unaddressed.

Happily for Sunak, his direct response chimes with the views of the great majority of his party, and no doubt at least some of the voters he seeks to win back before the next election. For most people, such matters do not drive their vote, but for some it matters a very great deal – and let’s face it, the Conservatives haven’t got much else to capitalise on at the moment.

As their controversial and outspoken deputy chair, Lee Anderson, reflected not so long ago, the 2019 election was won on three things – Boris, Brexit and Corbyn. Now that they’ve all disappeared, the Tories need something else for the British general election of 2024. Last month, Anderson suggested that two key ingredients to winning in 2024 are the “culture wars and [the] trans debate”.

“Culture wars” basically refers to the politicisation of issues that were once firmly kept out of party politics and party manifestos, and were left to the consciences of individual members of parliament.

For whatever reason, this is no longer the case, though the UK has not yet travelled so disastrously down this road as America, where apparently you cannot believe in the Roe v Wade judgement and the right to abortion at the same time as being a Republican (other than “in name only”). Conversely – though, one senses, not to the same militant degree – it may be difficult for some to be a devout Roman Catholic opponent of abortion (broadly speaking) and a Democrat.

The problem with these culture wars is obvious from the experience of America. It is that traditional political divisions based on class become distorted, and that party political debate becomes inflamed when the most intimate of beliefs, and the most personal of interests, are the subject of low-grade emotive argument.

It’s like when nationalism gets hold of politics and distorts the issues grotesquely. (Scotland’s particular misfortune is to have had the politics of personal identity and national identity replace the traditional left-right divide. It simply does not work, logically or practically. I’ve never understood why you can’t believe in, say, a low-tax small-state economy, be against the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, and also be passionately in favour of an independent Scotland.)

Most important of all, the heavy party politicisation of such social issues entrenches positions and makes a consensus much more difficult to reach. It is evidently that much more difficult to find a broad national approach to the rights of trans people if you’ve tangled it up with Brexit, or higher taxes – or, indeed, the struggle for Scottish independence.

In Macmillan’s day, homosexuality was illegal, but through a process of official reports, campaigning, cross-party efforts in parliament, and a more open debate about what was a taboo at the time, changes in the law coupled with the gradual evolution of social attitudes meant that real, sustainable progress was achieved – albeit too slowly and haltingly – through partial legalisation, all the way to equal marriage and Pride.

Of course, that journey is still not complete, but at least inequality is not entrenched, and you can be an openly gay Conservative or Labour politician and suffer no significant detriment. The cause was always pursued with more energy by Liberal and Labour figures, but never exclusively, and Tory governments led by John Major and David Cameron also oversaw major progressive steps forward.

The analogy with trans rights is imperfect, and, for some, misguided. Yet the outlines of consensus can be dimly perceived through the fog of this culture war. Trans people should have rights and equality. They should not be unfairly discriminated against. There is a difference between biological sex and gender. Women, however you define them, should have safe spaces. In most areas of life, there is no clash between treating trans people and non-trans people equally.

Some other areas, evidently, are controversial, as we have seen – prisons, changing areas, public toilets, sport. Some feel that women’s rights are being neglected or even eroded. I’d argue it’s also the case that medical and ethical experts have not had enough input in the debate – again a function of its increasing party politicisation.

I’d also say that the “lived experience” of trans people is unfamiliar to the majority of the country, and should be better understood as another foundation for a national policy (and one that ideally should prevail across the UK, for practical purposes).

Something like the Wolfenden Committee of the 1950s, which looked seriously and dispassionately at the legal status of gay men, would be one way of dealing with the practical consequences of equal rights for trans people, and could formulate recommendations for their legal protection.

It seems strange, now, that it took an official inquiry to conclude that there are some areas of life that “must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business”, as the Wolfenden report of 1957 did. But it was the premise on which deeply hostile public opinion was reformed – along with the law – in the decades that followed.

A royal commission on the rights of trans people wouldn’t end the arguments – but it would make them better informed, and moderate them.

At any rate, it’s a more promising way to get the correct reforms than watching the PM and the leader of the opposition answer questions about whether women have penises and men have cervixes. They’ve no more idea than the rest of us.