Relationships

Sex matters when it comes to sex and sexual orientation.

What’s the problem? 

Laws and policies which say that people can change sex directly contradict the reality of sexual orientation, sexual consent and sexual reproduction. 

The law has long recognised deceit in sexual relationships as a crime, and that includes deception about what sex people say they are. The 1969 court case Corbett vs Corbett granted an annulment of a marriage on the grounds that April Ashley, despite having had sexual reassignment surgery, remained male. There have been several cases where women have been convicted of sexual assault for deceiving other women that they are a man in order to sleep with them.

The Crown Prosecution Service has promoted guidance which confuses sex and gender when it comes to sexual consent.

In October 2021, a BBC News article highlighted a problem that had already been much discussed on social media: that lesbians were being pressured and coerced into accepting trans-identifying men as partners. This situation developed out of the ideology that gender supersedes sex, recasting same-sex attraction as a matter of gender and casting gay men and women who are not attracted to the opposite sex as “transphobic”. This has been promoted by groups such as Stonewall and Amnesty International. 

Eroding the definition of man and woman in the Equality Act also erodes clarity about the definition of sexual orientation in the Equality Act 2010, which makes it harder to protect the rights of lesbians, gays and bisexuals. The LGB Alliance has faced a challenge to its charitable status because it supports lesbian, gay and bisexual people and defines sexual orientation in terms of sex.