With transgender issues in the news, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak was asked on Thursday, “What is a woman?” The Conservative MP refused to answer directly.
“Rishi Sunak, what is a woman?” TalkRadio host Julia Hartley-Brewer asked the chancellor, to which Sunak replied, “I thought the prime minister answered this brilliantly … I fully agree with him,” referring to recent comments in parliament by PM Boris Johnson.
Asked for his own definition of the term, Sunak repeated that Johnson “answered the question brilliantly.”
“Adult human female?” Hartley-Brewer suggested, to which Sunak repeated, “I thought he put it very well.”
Johnson on Wednesday told parliament that while transgender people “should be treated with the maximum possible generosity and respect,” he felt “when it comes to distinguishing between a man and a woman, that the basic facts of biology remain overwhelmingly important.”
Some transgender activists take issue with the term being linked to sex, since a ‘woman’ is defined as an “adult human female,” and transgender women are biologically male. Earlier this month, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer came down on the side of the trans movement when he declared “a woman is a female adult, and … trans women are women.”