Spalding and the Deepings MP John Hayes writes on sex and identity

Human beings long for community. To be fulfilled, we need to share and central to this is the fundamental concept of belonging.

Now though, there is a concerted attempt to confuse and distort the most fundamental form of belonging – to question whether we are male or female. Amongst much confusion, often deliberately propagated by those with a vested interest in misunderstanding, we must make sure that truth prevails.

Our identity as men or women is based on natural biological differences. This is unquestionable and has been so since the beginning of time. If an individual wishes to change their biological sex, they must undergo major surgery to alter their bodies.

Recently however, some have launched a concerted effort to replace these facts with the fiction that gender is fluid, divorced from physiology. They insist that gender is not predestined or related to biological facts, arguing that individuals should be free to legally choose either gender, or none at all, without any medical changes. Indeed the social media behemoth Facebook now allows its users to identify as one of 73 genders!

Only through a medium as daft as social media could this demonstrably ludicrous revision of language and biological reality have gained a serious foothold amongst those who should know better. Yet sadly, it has even found champions in my own party.

The Government has decided to launch an obscenely expensive 16-week consultation on the Gender Recognition Act of 2004. However, instead of asking people their thoughts and opinions on the most legitimate and compassionate way to respond to ‘transgenderism’, Ministers have decreed that the consultation should only extend far enough to consider how to make it easier for transgender people to legally change their birth certificates.

What’s more, the overwhelming majority of British people, who intuitively recognise the nonsense of all of this, are probably wholly unaware that the consultation has been launched! Meanwhile radical ‘LGTB’ groups have assertively pushed politically-motivated supporters to use the exercise to promote their agenda.

We must reaffirm that gender has no meaning if divorced from biological facts. Nobody must be allowed to change their natural gender without medical consultation. We should respond with reality and compassion towards those individuals who feel compelled to identify as the opposite sex. Extensive counselling and a long period of consideration and exploration must be compulsory before any surgical changes are made. Patience and kindness are what matter, not political posturing.

Many parents tell me they are horrified by the revelations that some young children, often still exploring their identity, have been prescribed ‘puberty blocker’ drugs that forcibly prevent the natural development of biological sex characteristics and can have horrible consequences.

Thankfully, the battle for sanity is not yet lost. In America, there are attempts to remove the word gender from UN documentation and it has been suggested that the American government is planning to create a legal definition of sex as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth". Of course, the tiny minority of births in which the biological sex it is not immediately clear must be exempt from any such proposals, with parents given as much time, care and medical guidance as they need.

There is nothing more cruel and humiliating than being stripped of our true sense of identity, it’s what Maoists once did to the people of China and Bolsheviks to those in Russia. Now, radicals want to rob us of every form of belonging, leaving only indistinguishable ‘global citizens’. Such activists don’t really care for those who are confused about their sexual identity, jumping at the chance to use them in their wider ideological crusade.

Surely, we should celebrate the God-given differences between men and women, enjoying the special characteristics of two naturally-ordained human types.