British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that sex differences are “common sense” at the Conservative Party Conference on Wednesday in Manchester.
“We shouldn’t get bulled into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t,” Sunak told the audience, which applauded in response. “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”
When asked on Thursday if he regrets his comments, Sunak said, “No, I think a a man is a man and a woman is a woman, I think most people watching this program will think that that’s common sense and that’s just a fact of biology.”
India Willoughby, an English broadcaster and self-identified transgender woman, criticized Sunak on social media and called his speech “outrageous.”
“There is no depths that this government will go in terms of putting people in danger and inciting threats to their lives,” Willoughby said in a video. “We now have a British government and a prime minister that has said that it doesn’t recognize trans people. . . If you don’t acknowledge a group of people exist, then obviously that group of people don’t have rights.”
“Trans people are the 2023 equivalent of the Jews in 1930s Germany,” Willoughby continued. “Not the Holocaust, that came later. 1930s Germany, when a minority were identified by the Nazis and blamed and dehumanized and denigrated to such a degree that the public turned on them.”
The percent of British people who describe themselves as “not at all prejudiced” against transgender people has fallen from 82 percent to 64 percent since 2019, according to the latest “British Social Attitudes” report by the National Center for Social Research.
Sunak also spoke briefly about parental rights at the conference, saying “it also shouldn’t be controversial for parents to know what their children are being taught in school about relationships.”
Sunak also referenced new policy proposals that would remove gender-inclusive language and protect single-sex hospital wards.
“I know as conservatives we know what a woman is. And I know the vast majority of NHS staff and patients do too,” Steve Barclay, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said at the Conservative Party Conference. “That is why I ordered a reversal of unacceptable changes to the NHS website that erase references to ‘women’ for conditions such as cervical cancer.”
“Patients should know when hospitals are talking about men or women,” Sunak said.
Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, agreed with the new policies in an interview with Sky News.
“Trans women have no place in women’s wards or indeed any safe space relating to biological women,” she said. “This is about protecting women’s dignity and women’s safety and privacy.”
National Review previously covered a new U.K. grassroots campaign embarking on a door-knocking initiative to ask candidates and elected officials to answer the question, “What is a woman?” Sunak said in a 2023 interview with Piers Morgan that a woman is an “adult human female.”