British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Thursday that women do not have penises as transgender controversies continue to roil British politics.
Sunak said in an interview with Conservative Home that “100 percent” of women are lack male genitalia, according to the Independent.
1/2 In response to Keir Starmer saying 99.9% of women “haven’t got a penis”, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak confirms he believes it’s actually “100%”. Sunak goes on to defend “compassion” for those thinking about gender but asserts the importance of biology for women’s rights. pic.twitter.com/5NHf0Inc1I
— Stephen Knight 🎙️ (@GSpellchecker) April 13, 2023
“We should always have compassion and understanding and tolerance for those who are thinking about changing their gender,” Sunak continued. “Of course, we should. But when it comes to these issues of protecting women’s rights, women’s spaces, I think the issue of biological sex is fundamentally important when we think about those questions. As a general operating principle for me, biological sex is vitally fundamentally important in these questions. We can’t forget that.”
Sunak’s declaration distances him from Labour leader Keir Starmer, who previously claimed that 99.9 percent of women do not have male genitalia, implying that 0.1 percent of women do have male genitalia, according to Sky News.
Starmer later clarified his stance, attempting to align himself with both women and transgender people. He admitted that very few people identify as the opposite sex, and argued that transgender issues should not create division.
“They need legal support and a framework. Most people don’t disagree with that, and that’s the framework within which we ought to look at these issues,” Starmer said. “But simply turning it into a toxic divide advances the cause of no one – the cause of women or those that don’t identify with the gender that they were born into.”
Culture war controversies are set to play a major role in the next election as the Labour Party remains divided on key questions.
Sunak seeks to uphold his promise to amend the legal definition of sex in the 2010 Equality Act to refer to biology rather than self-identification.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden reportedly snubbed Sunak after landing in Northern Ireland. Biden is a proponent of transgender causes, hosting transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney at the White House and declaring a National Transgender Day of Visibility last month.