Clause 4
Equality Bill
2:00 pm
Vera Baird (Solicitor General, Attorney General's Office; Redcar, Labour)
I shall try to make our intention as clear as I can. I am entirely satisfied that clause 7 fulfils our intention. Clause 13 covers the definition of discrimination, which is deliberately couched widely enough to include discrimination by perception and association, and comes to the aid of the category about which the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green is particularly troubled.
The explanatory notes state that a person who was “born physically female” and decides to live as a man,
“starts and continues to live as a man”,
with no medical intervention at all—just passes as a man—will have undergone gender reassignment. He will have started that process by proposing to do it in the first place, and will have continued it, but if he had started it—had proposed it, but withdrawn—he would still have been covered while he was proposing it. All the various vacillations of the process—often a very long one, is it not?—are very adequately covered by the definition, which is our intention, and we have fulfilled it.