I KNOW she’s trying to rewrite history on her trans views

Penny Mordaunt claims that, as Minister for Women and equalities, she was ‘challenging the trans orthodoxy with real and genuine concern’. She was doing nothing of the sort. And now with breathtaking hypocrisy she is trying to rewrite history.

I was there as a campaigner on behalf of women and children, and I could see exactly what was going on.

Penny Mordaunt now claims that in 2018 she launched an inquiry into the number of adolescent girls being sent to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock clinics in London and Leeds.

The Government equalities Office which she headed was supposed to safeguard the rights of women as well as minority groups. What I saw, by contrast, was a Whitehall department in thrall to trans ideology – its language, its goals, its propaganda.

A senior civil servant once insisted to me that the department was wholly impartial, but that was nonsense. Whenever I tried to challenge their doctrines on transgender policy, I was treated with barely disguised hostility.

On one occasion, at a Parliamentary session organised by the Monmouth MP David Davies to discuss women’s concerns, I was appalled to see two civil servants from the Government equalities Office sitting behind him, openly sniggering.

When I tried to raise a point in meetings with the Government equalities Office, the jargon employed by civil servants was blatantly biased. It was clear to me that their starting point was that ‘ trans women are women’ and that any debate about spaces exclusively for women, such as toilets and changing rooms, always had to incorporate trans women as well.

The hostility I faced was palpable. This made it impossible to have a meaningful discussion, let alone come to balanced decisions on policy. It seems under Penny Mordaunt, these attitudes were never questioned.

Much more was not questioned. When trans activists such as the Mermaids charity presented statistics to the original transgender equality inquiry in 2015, it was accepted without being fact-checked.

Government staff seemed to think that to raise any doubts about its unimpeachable accuracy would be transphobic.

Figures about the number of trans teenagers who had seriously considered suicide, for example, were taken at face value, even though they were disputed by the Tavistock clinic.

It was not until Liz Truss took over as equalities minister in 2019 that I began to see some of the bias being stripped back.

It’s bad enough that Miss Mordaunt was such an ineffectual defender of women’s rights, and her department apparently eager to swallow anything trans campaigners said.

What’s worse is her hypocrisy today, her pretence that she treated the trans bandwagon with scepticism.

Her claim last week that she demanded an ‘inquiry’ into the numbers being referred to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock is not the full story. Their research, if you can call it that, turned out to be a few statistics that any Google search could have discovered in moments.

When I offered my assistance to that ‘inquiry’ in 2018, I was told that its purpose had been misreported. It was not ‘an inquiry into the number of girls being referred’ – it was evidence-gathering on ‘the issues faced by people assigned female at birth who transition in adolescence’.

In other words, they weren’t as alarmed by the numbers of girls questioning their gender identity, as Miss Mordaunt now claims. In my view it was just a box-ticking exercise.

And look at that jargon – ‘people assigned female at birth.’ The Government’s own equalities office can’t bring itself to call a young female human simply ‘a girl’.

She has to be an ‘assigned female’ as if her femaleness is something she will grow out of.

WOMEN and girls are being erased. We’re seeing female-only spaces disappear everywhere, from the bra-fitting department of M&S to women’s prisons. Mothers-to-be are ‘ birthing parents’ and ‘pregnant people’, not women. Trans women are ‘women’ but pregnant women are ‘people’. That sums up Penny Mordaunt.

The remit of organisations such as Stonewall and Pink news is to dispense with biological sex as the distinction between men and women, and replace it with gender selfidentification. Both organisations were big fans of Penny Mordaunt.

Women who fight back are threatened on social media with rape and murder, and in the real world risk losing their jobs and their livelihoods.

At one Women’s Place UK meeting I attended in Brighton, to discuss violence against women, we had to run the gauntlet of screaming trans activists who then banged on the windows all the way through the debate.

This was real intimidation and very frightening. The police refused to intervene.

yet Penny Mordaunt, campaigning to be Britain’s next prime minister, says she wants to stop talking about this ‘toxic’ subject and move on to issues of greater relevance to the majority of the British public.

The majority of the British public are women. We’re sick of being treated as though our rights, and the safe spaces we fought so hard to win, are irrelevant. We will not be erased.