The past five years have been, as Baroness Falkner of Margravine puts it, a white-knuckle ride. As chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, she has found herself at the centre of one of the most toxic and politically charged debates in Britain.
Falkner, 70, whose tenure at the EHRC came to an end last week, was responsible for trying to draw the line between women’s rights and trans rights.
At times, the hostility has been overwhelming. Falkner was on the receiving end of relentless abuse from trans activists, and eventually had to leave social media entirely.
Some of the messages directed at her and others were so extreme that she became afraid that she was going to be attacked on her way to work, and began changing her daily route. “You’re afraid that somebody will flip and attack you, knife you, do whatever,” she says.
There was little respite at work. Falkner had to face down — and eventually overcome — an internal coup after a series of unfounded claims were made against her. Then, when Labour came to power, she was initially told that her time was up, only to have her contract extended by another year.
In the midst of it all, Falkner has been fighting her own, personal battle. In August last year she was given a diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer, something she never mentioned publicly. Three months later she had surgery to remove several organs.
Through it all she kept working, including during two rounds of chemotherapy. Today she is cancer-free, and feels nothing but profound gratitude for her time at the EHRC and the “absolute privilege” of leading the organisation. Life, she says, is wonderful. “Every day I wake up feeling strong and healthy is another bonus in life.”
Falkner with the former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy in 2001
IAN NICHOLSON/PA
She has unfinished business, however. Three months ago she submitted, with the support of the board, what she views as her legacy — statutory guidance on how public bodies, businesses and employers should interpret a seismic ruling by the Supreme Court. The ruling, on April 16, clarified that under the Equality Act 2010 the terms “women” and “sex” referred to “biological” sex, not acquired gender.
Since then, however, the guidance has gone nowhere. It is now somewhere in the bowels of the Department for Education, and there is no indication of when it will be published. The EHRC, Falkner says, has been told by the government that it is “all very complex and we need to take our time over it”.
She doesn’t buy it. “We’ve had external counsel, internal counsel, everybody’s looked at it. I mean, I’m so certain of the lawfulness of our code that I don’t think I’ve ever been so certain about anything before,” she says. “The other explanation simply is that they’re terrified of their MPs who would wish for trans self-identification or trans inclusion to prevail across all areas of society, including Section 3 of the Equality Act, and would wish for the exemptions not to exist.”
Falkner believes the party has lost touch with its fundamental values. “What really depresses me about the current state of the Labour Party is that they seem to have completely abandoned women’s rights,” she says. “The traditional party of rights, in my 40 years in this country, was the Labour Party. The party of feminism.
“I was mentored by a former, very senior, Labour woman, Shirley Williams. I was aware of women like Harriet Harman, Margaret Jay and Hilary Armstrong, Labour women who were committed to feminism in a manner which carefully asserted equality, true women’s equality. And I think they’ve lost it. This particular generation of Labour MPs have lost it.”
Falkner was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer last year, and has since had surgery
CIRCE HAMILTON FOR THE TIMES
The delay in publishing the EHRC guidance, Falkner says, leaves both women and trans people in a “grey zone”. Councils, NHS trusts and businesses are still allowing trans women — biological men who identify as women — to use single-sex spaces, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The danger in not publishing it is that people are left in the grey zone,” she says. “Women are still having to go to court to assert their rights. My greatest concern is that it’s very distressing for trans people. Some organisations are implementing it in one way, others are not.
“They’re concerned their rights are being taken away. Their anger should be directed at those snake-oil salesmen who sold them the fiction they had rights that have been taken away, and not ever explained that rights are balanced. And that in some areas, such as discrimination law, the rights of biological people hold.”
Public bodies, she says, do not need to wait — indeed, by doing so they may be breaking the law. The Cabinet Office has yet to withdraw guidance saying that transgender civil servants are still allowed to use the lavatories of their choice.
“One of the things we’ve tried to say to them, and it’s been repeated in parliament in questions all the time, is that the law is the law,” Falkner says. “You don’t need to wait for our guidance. Our guidance is a navigational tool. If they do nothing, as the NHS is doing, or a lot of other public bodies, and just say, ‘well, we’re waiting for — we’re not going to follow the law of the land’, that is potentially unlawful.
“They are inviting judicial action, they are saying, ‘you can do what you want. We are not going to change our ways.’”
The problem, according to Falkner, is not limited to Labour. Although Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader and former women and equalities minister, is “clearest in terms of her support”, Falkner says, the Tories failed to act on the EHRC’s advice and change the law.
“There seems to have been a passing around of a certain kind of Kool-Aid around 2015 when Stonewall [the campaign group] asserted that trans women were women, no debate,” she recalls. “And the political parties seem to have dropped it and it’s taken a while for them to wake up from it.”
Labour itself has been on a journey. As recently as 2022, Sir Keir Starmer and most of his cabinet were unable to say whether women had penises.
“It made my heart ache, I used to shout at the radio every morning when I heard those stories,” she says. “Why do you think they couldn’t answer that question? Because they believed that accommodating vulnerable trans people was more important than protecting the interests of vulnerable women.
Falkner is critical of the position that Sir Keir Starmer and most of his cabinet held about whether a woman can have a penis
HOUSE OF COMMONS/PA
“When you casually dismiss the reality of more than 51 per cent of your population in favour of what you think is the right way forward to protect a very, very, very small group of — albeit very vulnerable — people, then you need to do a stock take. Is that proportionate?”
She says the EHRC’s guidance is ultimately practical. “Nobody has to stand outside a loo. In our society we police ourselves all the time. Supermarkets don’t sell booze to a kid. You don’t drive down a one-way street in the same direction. The social contract is founded on trust.”
Falkner believes there is a wider problem with public bodies. “It is shocking that our public institutions are so compromised, but they will not accept that they have got it wrong in the past and now need a course correction,” she says. “You see a general disdain in the ‘lanyard class’, for a respect for fairness and impartiality. ‘My truth has got to be the only truth that matters, and because I’m passionate about X or Y or Z that passion replaces the need for professionalism.’
“Traditionally I think employers wanted workers where you left your politics at the door when you came in. Your authentic self was going to be in the evening with your family and friends down the pub or playing pool or whatever. Employers stop demanding the level of professionalism of which impartiality is the bulwark.”
Labour’s failure to defend women and girls, she says, goes well beyond the debate over trans rights. The battle to get a national inquiry into grooming gangs shows the scale of the problem.
She highlights a review by Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who found that disproportionate numbers of Asian men were responsible for child sex grooming gangs. “When you have Louise Casey having to remind us that there is something profoundly wrong with the fact that it happens in pockets of society where predominantly my co-nationals, Pakistani men, are there, why were the women and girls so misbelieved? You would have expected this traditional party to be standing up for women and girls, particularly the most oppressed, the most vulnerable. And it took Louise Casey to remind them of that.”
She is particularly concerned by the government’s plans to bring in a new definition of Islamophobia. “What do you think that’s going to do to our ability to challenge Muslims who break the law? Will it not have a chilling effect?”
Falkner came to Britain in 1976 from Pakistan, via the Middle East. “I came at the height of Paki-bashing. You did feel threatened by skinhead groups and things like that. I felt less threatened than my Pakistani male friends and relatives.”
Britain needs to follow the example of other countries and do more to assimilate migrants, she says. “We want people to come here and are perfectly content to let them live parallel lives. They can go and live among their friends and relatives and never engage with wider societal conversations or norms.”
Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, who told the Commons she had been called a “f***ing Paki”, is brilliant, Falkner says. “She’s terrific. She’s prepared to do what is necessary for her job, for her party and for her country. And I find that refreshing, enormously refreshing.”
Falkner views her work at the EHRC as the zenith of her career, but when she was first sounded out for the role she was unconvinced.
“I think there was also reluctance to my part because I thought it was the colour of my skin — or, as Trevor Phillips called it, the melanin mix you have — that was leading people to think I could do it,” she says. “So I resisted it. But when I started thinking, when I started looking at all the things I had views on, they came back to the same road. And that road was here at the EHRC.”
On her arrival, she became concerned about how the Equality Act was being interpreted and the number of high-profile cases involving single-sex spaces. The EHRC issued clarifying guidance in April 2022 emphasising that sex under the terms of the equality act referred to biological sex. The guidance, however, was non-statutory and there was “no change in anyone’s behaviour”.
In 2023, Falkner faced a concerted attempt to remove her from office after unsubstantiated claims of bullying and harassment. The watchdog eventually dropped the investigation. “I got a full apology from the board,” she says. “And unusually — and I’m enormously grateful — I got a good portion of my legal fees covered by the EHRC, with the Treasury’s permission. And you know, the Treasury doesn’t do that if it doesn’t believe that.”
However, leaks about the investigation made it “open season” for her detractors. “I got a lot of threats,” she says. “I had to change my way to work. I walked in different directions, to different Tube stations. Because you’re afraid that somebody will flip and attack you, knife you, do whatever.”
When Labour came to power, ministers initially suggested that her contract was likely to come to an end in December 2024. She decided not to fight it, not least because of her cancer diagnosis.
“I was extremely ill and going through chemotherapy and still hanging on in there doing a three-day-a-week job,” she says. “I thought well, if I’m not going to be around for very much longer it doesn’t really matter whether I get renewed or not. I’ll just do this job to the best of my ability until events overtake themselves. And I just plodded on.”
Then her contract was unexpectedly extended for another year. This meant she was in place when the Supreme Court’s ruling landed.
For women’s rights campaigners, it was a moment of jubilation. For Falkner, it was just the beginning of a long, hard process of drawing up practical guidance that continues to this day. “I saw the jubilation in the women’s groups … and actually my heart sort of sank because you knew that this was only the beginning of the end,” she says.
Her battle with cancer has given Falkner perspective. She began feeling unwell in January last year and spent months trying to convince NHS consultants to give her a laparoscopy on the advice of her sister, a cancer surgeon who lives in the US. In August, with her condition rapidly deteriorating, she decided to go private and was immediately taken into surgery.
“The cancer cells had wrapped themselves around my colon,” she says. “I had advanced ovarian cancer caused by my fallopian cells discharging cancer cells. And they had spread to several organs.”
She was given a stoma and went through a round of chemotherapy before having surgery at the end of November. After the operation she had lost a quarter of her body weight, and was only six and a half stone.
She has since made a full recovery, and decided to keep working. “The best thing my wonderful surgeon said to my husband — who wanted me to rest — was, ‘she’s not an Amazon delivery driver. She won’t be lugging heavy parcels up and down flights of stairs. She’s an intelligent woman who will know when she can do her Zoom call and when she can’t, when she can read her papers and when she can’t. You let her decide.’”
Falkner is not retiring. She will focus on her work as a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords, and in her spare time brush up on her Italian. “What’s the point of not working?” she asks. “I’ve never got it.”
Baroness Falkner CV
Born: 9 March 1955
Education
St Joseph’s Convent School, Karachi, an all-girls private Catholic school. BSc international relations at LSE, MA international relations and European studies, University of Kent.
Career
Before entering parliament, Falkner worked in the public, corporate and voluntary sectors. She was director of international affairs, 1993-99, and director of policy, 1997-99, for the Liberal Democrats; Commonwealth Secretariat, 1999- 2003; and chief executive of Student Partnerships Worldwide, 2003-04, a charity focused on aiding young people in Africa and Asia.
She stood unsuccessfully for Westminster and for the EU and was made a life peer in 2004. She sat as a Liberal Democrat peer until 2019, when she switched to a non-affiliated peer before becoming a crossbencher in 2020.
Tony Blair included her in a task force on Muslim extremism after the 7//7 bombings in 2005. Falkner served as inaugural chancellor at the University of Northampton, 2008-2016. From 2015 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the Policy Institute, King’s College London.
In 2018, she was inducted into the Bank of England enforcement decision-making committee. In 2020, she became the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and in November 2024, Bridget Phillipson announced that her four-year term would be extended by a year.
Family
Married to Robert Falkner, a professor at LSE, with whom she has one daughter.