I am so incredulous at Labour I feel I need to rehearse this scenario in case I missed something.
Under Labour party rules, (brought in without proper debate with its members, and over which many female Labour members have resigned), self identifying as such is enough to qualify ‘as a man’ or ‘as a woman’ for Labour party purposes.
Self ID means THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE between person A who self identified as a woman to get themselves on the candidate list for woman’s officer (who then gets suspended by the party as a member for his trouble) and person B who stood in the same way and was elected as a local party woman’s officer.
Anyone who supports trans people being recognised as their chosen sex legally, as a formalised way of treating their choices and feelings with dignity, should also be opposed to self identification because it is a completely, inherently flippant concept.
SELF IDENTIFICATION is exactly that. It doesn’t need any distinction or justification of whether you genuinely feel that you are of your chosen gender or chosen sex (or if you just want to live as/present yourself as such) ...
self ID can’t validate whether you have felt that way for 2 seconds, or gone to lengths to live as the opposite sex (or as neither sex/both sexes at the same time) for 2 years or for 20 years.
Self ID requires zero modification of anything- dress, clothes, manner, bodily appearance- that wasn’t there before the magic self ID statement was uttered or written on the application form.
Self ID doesn’t allow anyone to distinguish if you are just taking the piss... or if you just want to get into the women’s toilets so that you can get off on listening to them piss... or worse.
With self ID it’s all on an exactly equal footing.
Anyone can just say the magic words at any time (and can change their mind as many times and as often as they want, over time).
With legal self ID (which is not the law in the UK- but the government might consult on making it so 
) the self IDer can be legally RECOGNISED and legally PROTECTED as a man or as a woman just because they say they are.
Anyway back to the Labour Party. Party Rules are party rules and self ID is Labour’s chosen rule. They have said that anyone who identifies as a woman, can be recognised as a woman and thus can stand and hold party office as a woman. Taking us roles reserved for women.
I would assume that this rule also applies to any trans officer roles that the party offers since those would logically also be based on self ID?
Allowing Anyone who IDs themselves as whatever, to ‘be’ that for party purposes, can only mean.... literally anyone.
I don’t understand then, the basis on which Labour thinks that anyone but David Lewis himself, can question what David Lewis self-identifies as?
What is great for public debate in what David Lewis has done, (...noting that DL and the #ManFriday people seem to be the only self-identifying people who do support public debate...) is that David Lewis is apparently doing this to highlight this debate.
This means he is maybe a bit less likely to kick off at anyone who questions if DL is really a woman. DL may be a bit less likely to call them ‘transphobic’ for questioning the self identification DL chooses, with serious ramifications for the ‘transphobic’ labelled person’s personal life and career.
DL may be less likely to hound them, make them feel unsafe, try to get them kicked out of the Labour party (Er... instead of David Lewis having been suspended by Labour...).
We are all able to talk, laugh and debate this freely and speculate about DL’s motives ONLY because we think from what he has said in an interview to the Spectator, that DL is trying to make a gender critical point.
BUT we only know that from his interview. Nobody could have known it from his woman’s officer application form which was accepted by Labour. His application confirmed with their self ID rules.
We cant really know that he won’t do that stuff ^ with any certainty, because I can’t look into DL’s mind. under self ID, David Lewis certainly could do all that authoritarian silencing behaviour above if he wanted to... and what could the Labour Party do to stop it? Nothing. Because Self ID is self ID^. And it seems we are being increasingly told to treat it as if it were legally binding.
Labour are choosing to effectively recognise self ID within the party as if it were legal self ID. Self ID and the current process for certification which allows people to change legal gender on their documents (under the Gender Recognition Act) are two different things.
Under Labour’s own rule of self ID, David Lewis has as much right to stand for election as woman’s officer, trans officer, as any other person who wants to stand as a woman’s officer.
But David Lewis is now being prevented from that and has been suspended from the party. Why?
Is there a secret extra or new clause in ‘self ID’ that DL somehow violated that we don’t know about? That has never been applied to other candidates before now? What would that be? Why can’t they tell us?
Self ID is dangerous, tokenistic, virtue signalling numbskullery and David Lewis has only ever gone along with its rules.
All those objecting (hello, Labour Party officials who suspended DL!) should be looking to critique their party’s own misogynistic non- democratic rulemaking and Labours blatant lack of concern for women’s issues and representation.
Labour should be ashamed of themselves for not listening to the very, very many women (and men) who have been pointing this out for months. There is nothing new or against their rules that DL has done.
PS none of this is to say that there is anything wrong or unusual in feeling that gender is bullshit, nor in living as a ‘masculine’ woman or as a ‘feminine’ man or living as someone who just doesn’t buy into gender at all. Gender is a made up way of enforcing a hierarchy between sexes, universally used to keep women down at the bottom because our biology makes us usually relatively smaller, weaker and we are able to bear children.
I just think the law, the state, political party structures etc should not be required to recognise and validate flippant, transient feelings on the same level as they also recognise biological reality.
Sex and biology is real and means we need legal recognition and protections around our sex to deal with the reality of different needs and to protect people from the social inequalities caused by gender stereotyping.
(Dysmorphia is real too and needs proper support from a qualified psychologists and doctors.)
The GRA is imperfect but it aims to weed out those with flippant feelings and to accommodate people who have made a serious commitment to live as the opposite sex. GRA allows them to change their legal sex on their personal legal documentation and involves some objective discussion with doctors etc), and puts in a requirement that they have lived ‘as’ the opposite sex for a couple of years. It was brought in back when same sex marriage wasn’t allowed, and civil partnership had not been brought in for same sex couples.
I just don’t get what Labour are complaining that David Lewis has done wrong?