Tory leader candidate Penny Mordaunt clarifies trans stance after gender recognition controversy

12 July 2022, 20:49 | Updated: 20 October 2022, 13:51

Tory leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt has clarified her stance on trans issues after opponents brought it up during the race for Downing Street.

She said she never supported self-identification of gender when a caller, Nicola from Leicester, asked if she would allow "anyone" to change their gender on their birth certificate at will.

Ms Mordaunt has been battling against accusations she is a "committed warrior for the trans lobby", as she was dubbed by the Conservatives for Women campaign group who raised Ms Mordaunt's involvement in a past Government attempt to allow people to self-identify without a medical diagnosis.

"I've never supported self ID. There are some people that socially transition, but what we were looking at what was the Gender Recognition Act, and it's a process that people go through," she told LBC's Iain Dale after getting through to the first ballot of Tory MPs on Wednesday.

"There was clamour to separate that out from healthcare and I disagreed with that."

She went on: "I think that we needed to do some things to make it easier for people to access services, the waiting list to access services were a couple of years, there were things that we could do to help people actually have their documents like driving licenses and passports actually in the same gender - terrible problems for people when that happened."

A Gender Recognition Act during Theresa May's government would have allowed trans people to self-identify as male or female without a medical diagnosis.

Read more: Sunak and Truss clear first Tory leadership hurdle as eight candidates survive nominations

The plans were axed by Liz Truss, who became women's minister after Mrs May left office and Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister.

When Iain put it to her that she had previously said trans women are women, Ms Mordaunt said: "In law, some are. I'm a woman, I'm a biological woman, if I had a mastectomy in future years I would still be a woman, I am a woman in every cell of my body. I'm also legally a woman.

"And people who have been through the gender recognition process, gender reassignment, some people will have a birth certificate reissued to them in their new gender. And in law they will be in their new gender and when you're writing law about those people you have to take that into account.

"That doesn't mean they are identical to me, and a lot of the issues you are hearing now, I was talking about three or four years ago."

Ms Mordaunt, who will need to pick up at least 30 supporters on Wednesday to progress in the Tory leadership election, said she backed an inquiry about girls being moved into trans services, and was concerned about trans women in sports competitions.

Read more: Zahawi tells teachers and nurses to 'be disciplined' amid calls for pay rise

"I'm just sorry that this is the kind of thing my opponents are doing," she said, claiming she had not been involved in drafting the bill and had been given it the day before it was presented to MPs.

Speaking on economic issues, Ms Mordaunt, a navy reservist, dubbed herself the "know bleeping well what you're doing" contender as she hit out at her rivals' "extreme" tax cut plans.

Many of the eight who have made it to Wednesday's first ballot of Conservative MPs to see who remains in the race have pledged a range of tax cuts.

Ms Mordaunt herself advocates slashing VAT on fuel by half and will look at other measures.

But she warned against being irresponsible with the nation's finances at a time of soaring inflation. Critics have raised concerns about slashing taxes and giving people more spending power when prices are high.