Sir Keir Starmer no longer believes trans women are women in the wake of last week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling.
The prime minister has previously said that “trans women are women”, but asked to repeat that statement on Tuesday he pointed to the judgment, which ruled the term woman referred to biological sex, saying it had “answered that question”.
Downing Street later confirmed the U-turn. Asked if the PM still believed that a transgender woman was a woman, his official spokesman said: “No, the Supreme Court judgment has made clear that when looking at the Equality Act, a woman is a biological woman. That is set out clearly by the court judgment.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused Sir Keir of peddling a “shameless work of fiction” over his U-turn.
She added: “Labour now says that they know what a woman is and that transgender people should use services and facilities designated to their biological sex. They’ve never said this before. This is a U-turn but we welcome it.”
His comments came just hours after the equalities minister Bridget Phillipson said trans women should use male toilets, adding that “services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex”.
Later she praised JK Rowling after she was asked in the Commons about the Harry Potter author, a long-time campaigner on this issue.
She said she paid “tribute to all of those women”, who incuded Ms Rowling and the swimmer Sharron Davies.
In last week’s long-awaited judgment, the UK’s highest court confirmed the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.
Asked about the issue on Tuesday, Sir Keir said that a woman was an “adult female”. And, in his first public comments since the justices’ decision on 16 April, the Labour leader said he was “really pleased” with the clarity offered by the court’s ruling.
He said the judgment was a “welcome step forward” adding: “It’s real clarity in an area where we did need clarity, I’m pleased it’s come about. We need to move and make sure that we now ensure that all guidance is in the right place according to that judgment.”
In March 2022, before he entered No 10, Sir Keir told The Times that “a woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is not just my view, that is actually the law”.
A year later he appeared to change his position, stating that 99.9 per cent of women “haven’t got a penis”.
In recent days former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has warned that organisations are potentially misinterpreting the landmark ruling, arguing it did not create an obligation to provide single-sex spaces.
Instead, Lord Sumption argued that while many have taken the ruling to mean that service providers are obliged to provide single-sex spaces based on biological sex, the ruling meant that excluding transgender people from single-sex spaces was allowed, and not a breach of the 2010 Equality Act.
