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Chris Grayling: Is the hon. Gentleman saying, then, that Parliament should not be minded to take religious views and principles into account? He appears to be saying that Parliament should not see itself as constrained by those issues.

Richard Younger-Ross: I refer the hon. Gentleman to my opening comments, in which I said that the Minister should take account of those concerns in the legislation and how it is drawn up. However, in my view, we cannot make an amendment that would give primacy to a Church or set of beliefs over all other aspects of legislation. The new clause would set a precedent of giving the Church—or faiths—primacy over legislation, and human rights legislation in particular. Human rights legislation is designed to protect us all in matters other than just those covered by the Bill. If we accepted this new clause, it would be argued that such amendments should be made to other legislation, in other fields.

Dr. John Pugh (Southport) (LD): Does my hon. Friend accept that human rights legislation covers precisely those rights of freedom of thought, conscience and religion?

Richard Younger-Ross: This new clause would put the freedoms, thoughts and rights of that faith over human rights legislation.

Dr. Pugh: I can see no mention in the new clause of any specific faith. It simply mentions general rights, which as I understand it are general human rights.
 
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Richard Younger-Ross: I wonder whether we are getting on to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The purpose of the new clause is to change the legislation to give primacy to those Churches over the Bill's clauses. If that were not the case, there would be no purpose in the hon. Member for Gainsborough moving the amendment.

Mr. Bercow : May I help the hon. Gentleman?

Richard Younger-Ross: I should be grateful.

Mr. Bercow: May I put it to the hon. Gentleman that the charge against the new clause moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) is slightly less exacting and severe than that which the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) has levelled, but that it is nevertheless significant? The charge against new clause 1 is not that it would render the rest of the Bill null and void, but that it would deny to transsexuals the principle of equality of treatment that underlies the Bill, and which is its raison d'être. It is mightily difficult to envisage precisely what paragraph (b) of amendment 1 would mean in practice.

Richard Younger-Ross: I take the point. I am not trying to make the charge against the hon. Member for Gainsborough that he is trying to undermine all human rights legislation. I would not say that, but to deny transgendered people those rights under this Bill undermines the very reason for the Bill itself, in the context of a particular group and society. There are exclusions in the Bill, which we have debated and accepted. The question is how far we go in accepting exclusions.

Chris Grayling: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Richard Younger-Ross: I want to make some progress, but I shall give way one more time.

Chris Grayling: I am grateful. Will the hon. Gentleman encapsulate for the House at what point he believes that the legislature should or should not override the conscience of individuals in order to secure the human rights of others?

Richard Younger-Ross: How long will we be staying here tonight? There are some general points in the Bill that I hope will clarify that, although I accept the point. It is very difficult to know where to draw the line, but we have done that in other cases.

Mr. Bercow: Will the hon. Gentleman give way just once more?

Richard Younger-Ross: I am too generous.

Mr. Bercow: The hon. Gentleman's generosity of spirit invariably gets the better of him, and today is no exception. It was very good of him even to start to answer the tortuous essay question that my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) posed. I put it to the hon. Member for Teignbridge that the gravamen of the issue is this: respect for some people's rights should not extend so far as to allow them
 
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to practise their rights if that violates those of others. Granting the respect for rights that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough has in mind would do damage to the rights of others. That is the unacceptability of the proposition.

Richard Younger-Ross: The hon. Gentleman puts the matter extremely clearly and concisely, in his own impeccable way. I was going to put it differently, but he has encapsulated the point beautifully.

I want to continue in my way on the consequences of the new clause. The hon. Member for Gainsborough referred to Christians not excluding others. I wish that that were the case. It might be that in this country, the Christian Churches do not exclude others—because, in effect, of the legislation that we have brought in over the years to stop such discrimination. Not so long ago that was not the case, and we would not have to go very far to find other countries where some Christian Churches have excluded others for all sorts of reasons. There have been exclusions on mental health grounds, on grounds of colour and on grounds of gender. That has all happened in our lifetimes, and happens in other parts of the world today.

Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): Will the hon. Gentleman give way very briefly?

Richard Younger-Ross: Go on.

Andrew Selous: I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he was generous in Committee and he is being generous again now. Is not the nub of his argument that, as far as religious organisations are concerned—let us not forget that they are what the clause is talking about—he is trying to say that secular, humanist, human rights-based law should have precedence over a concern for freedom of religion?

Richard Younger-Ross: I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that that law does have precedence. Laws that we have passed already affect how churches can act. That does not affect religious thought or what people think, but it does affect their actions. There are a number of examples of that. However, we are diverging into other areas. Let me come to the nub of my point, and then the hon. Gentleman might catch Mr. Deputy Speaker's eye and be able to put his arguments. Perhaps he himself will be generous in allowing interventions on those points.

1.30 pm

The essence of my argument is that the hon. Member for Gainsborough was wrong: there is discrimination within Christian Churches, and I make that point as a practising Roman Catholic. All is not always rosy in the religious garden. Much has been made of how my own faith treated unmarried mothers in Ireland, denying them basic human rights. Today, all of us—including even the Roman Catholic Church—would accept that that was an appalling way to behave. This legislation deals with other discrimination issues, and I hope that in passing it—as we doubtless will—we will protect people who have been discriminated against for centuries.
 
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That brings me to my second argument with the hon. Member for Gainsborough. He used the word "choice"—as if one wanders downstairs in the morning, looks in the mirror and suddenly thinks, "I want to be a woman today." That is not how it happens. There was an excellent recent television series about intersexual people: those whose gender is determined by doctors at birth for hormonal or chromosomal reasons and who are thereby denied a choice at an early stage in their life, and who then decide that the doctors got it wrong, and that the gender that they wish to be is not the same as that to which they were assigned at birth.

My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris)—he sends his apologies for not being here—is a doctor, and perish the thought that I should do a disservice to doctors by saying that they make mistakes, but the fact is that they do. [Interruption.] Apparently, my hon. Friend is here but has just left the Chamber; he was late arriving because his train was delayed. A number of mistakes were certainly made so far as intersexual children were concerned, as the television series to which I referred demonstrated perfectly well.

One can go further. Who knows how the brain works? We still do not fully understand how it works. Who understands what triggers a person's brain—often at the very young age of three, four or five—to decide that they are in a body of the wrong gender. [Interruption.] I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon back to the Chamber. We do not know at what stage such things happen. We do not know precisely what causes a person to decide that they are of the wrong gender, and that they wish to adopt the gender that they consider has always been theirs. Such people have the mind of a woman but happen to have the body of a man, or vice versa. Who is to determine what happened to them, and whether the cause was hormonal or chromosomal?

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