Potential WI Schism

A pertinent post on that thread from @nilsmousehammer · 05/06/2023 11:12

"Its the story too of many lesbians groups and specific women's health/chronic illness support groups. They have been forced to disband publicly and go under ground to avoid hostile takeover and invasion from entitled men. There's nothing progressive or 'kind' about it. It's targeted destruction.
I saw a twitter thread a few weeks back where a group had disbanded to end being harassed by men insisting on attending and instead begun to meet as friends at one of their houses. The men turned up on the drive, demanded admission, and called the police to have their 'rights' enforced when the women said no. Thankfully the police told them they had no right at all to enter a private home uninvited.
Women are being driven underground. The 'womens services' and groups left are increasingly male centred and largely about women willing to revolve around men and the service and head patting of men.
Fuck that. Women don't go to clubs and groups to nurse male egos".

Women are still having to fight that destructive male entitlement that sees women and women's organisations as theirs for the taking.
Yes the SC judgment is starting to erode that and judging by the comments under articles in The Times / Telegraph etc, men are now fully on board with challenging this.
But OMG, apart from the hilarity caused by Mr Moo's bingo card posts, it's enraging that these toxic men are still able to persuade the hard of thinking that it's their right to target and trash anything related to women and girls.

Oh god, if I see this smug cheeky peeking face one more bloody time... 😡

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/21276923.suffolk-retiree-becomes-first-trans-woman-appear-cover-wi-magazine/
Published: 1st July 2021

After seeing Loraine, who she describes as her "rock", as president of the Elmsett and Aldham WI, which closed in 2019, Ms Wenham said she was inspired to seek out her own "vibrant" chapter.

I think this passed me by back them - but I've bolded the important bit. Do branches close frequently?

I’d far rather attend a meeting with ‘cis men’ present while discussing vulcal cancers than a transwoman. I mean I’d rather it was just women, but if men were going to be present I know which I’d prefer to be there.

Really? Every time a meet a woman I comment on her being a woman and expect her to comment on my womanliness too. How on earth will we be secure and happy knowing we are women if it is never mentioned?

Oh no, hang on that doesn't happen and the only reason anyone would ever tell a TiM they are a woman is because they know they are actually a man.

https://www.thewi.org.uk/campaigns/resolutions/nfwi-resolution-shortlist-2025-26

The "love your vulva" thing was actually one of the five choices offered for members to pick one cause to support for the next year. It focussed on self checking for cancer and raising awareness of vulval cancers.

I remember seeing one online TW "mantrum" where he was claiming that people tell him he's a woman all the time.
Funnily enough in over 40 years of actually being a woman nobody has felt the need to tell me that and I have never felt the need to hear it

It's as if the more they implore us they're women, the more they show us they're men, and the worst kind of men to boot.
A natural companion to "If you see a TERF, f***g punch her in the face!"

Sneaking around, inspecting genitals and killing people
Its not GC Feminists that are into those things

Brain like Swiss cheese, where simple activities are maintained, but anything more falls out of the holes, let alone critical thinking.
More seriously, we know these posters are click bait in human form, and the worst kind, men actively enjoying riling up women, and all of us who value intelligent discourse and hate it when we're presented with misogynist terminology.
All I can say to people on here, is that this is the death rattle stage of the ideology, the days when the horizon was uniformly dark are over, the law is homing into view.
Today, The Times reports that the new head of ECHR is saying that their guidance, formulated for months now, has been rigorously legally checked wrt the SC ruling, all that's needed is Phillipson (and by extension, Sir Keir "I will without fail follow the law of the land, all else is far right anarchy" Starmer) to get on with it ASAP.
The inevitable cannot be stopped for much longer.
The death rattle is apparent from the ramblings of Silly Moo, with all this talk of "genital police", the law will have to be broken etc etc.
Dear friend, it's not 2016 anymore, where even JK Rowling and Lionel Schriver, no shrinking violets they, kept their mouths shut.
It's not 2020/21, where the Omnicause propelled aggressive trans ideology as a cultural litmus test for fealty.
It's not even 2024 anymore, where men talked wildly about breastfeeding their babies, men at the Olympics were officially allowed to beat women to global audiences.
No, it's 2025, where Cass is the official advice going forward, and the SC ruling passes the 9 year olds intelligence test, as unambiguous and straightforward as it could be.
Sure, idiots like the woman pushing the WI to go all touchy feely inclusive "sisterhood" concept may put her arm around Silly Moo, but the reality on the ground is only becoming more focussed and more unavoidable.
The death rattle looks wholly scary, but I think we'll find it's the likes of Silly Moo and his acolytes that have most to be worried about, despite the optics seemingly still on their side.

Thread about him getting onto NFWI membership committee

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4820740-remember-petra-wenham-the-first-transwoman-to-be-on-the-wi-mag-cover?reply=126662559

Reminds me rather of the time that I found that there appeared to be a transwoman on the Patients committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. I can’t be 100% sure and they don’t publish the committee names any more but I was pretty sure at the time. It is amazing, still, how men always get these key positions in women’s organisations.

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/21276923.suffolk-retiree-becomes-first-trans-woman-appear-cover-wi-magazine/

That would be "Petra" whose wife was high up in one of the regional areas, he was the one who was on the cover of the WI magazine, when NFWI first let TiM in.

Within 2 years, "Petra" then got onto the membership committee of the National Federation.

I did an course about creating faces from skulls - Forensic Facial Reconstruction,

It was fun!

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that a woman quite high up in the WI has a TIM husband and that's part of the reason why there's been such a push for these males to be included. Am I misremembering or is there something to this?

"i think it makes more logical sense to class trans women as women, and maintain women only spaces that can then exclude cis men."

No shit. No-one's thought of this before. You're a stone cold brain-box

As to the sunken costs fallacy. Helen Joyce at Sex Matters made a similar point in an interview, a couple of years ago I think.

She said that this movement will keep going because of the parents who ‘transed’ their children. To do otherwise would be to accept the unacceptable, that they had been complicit in harming their own child.

I’m paraphrasing, but she said that these parents were writing their children a cheque that couldn’t be cashed ie they would never be the opposite sex & society could not be forced to see them as such.

She said that she herself was a ‘standing reproach’ to these parents, as she refused to go along with the lie.

I think she’s completely right. My friend rushed headlong into helping socially transition her bereaved, autistic anxious daughter. Now an adult she’s on cross sex hormones. There’s been a quiet murmur about surgery.

We know the long term effects of years of testosterone on a female body. When she starts to suffer vaginal atrophy, has the inevitable hysterectomy & enters menopause in her 20s/30s I’m sure my friend will still be flag waving. Probably complaining that she wasn’t allowed puberty blockers. She will never back down, she’s utterly captured.

Is it not more a ‘transwoman’ man’ and a ‘cis’ man. They are just men. The first being men who try to claim (a fiction) they are not men. The other men who do not try to deny that they are men.

How ludicrous!

Anyway, you don't need to "strip search" someone to know that they are male in 99% of cases.

Have you seriously no empathy or fellow feeling for women at all?

"Men can't get into women-only spaces" is a necessary restriction on men's freedom, in order to protect women's rights.

And the rule that you can't discriminate against people on the basis of sex by having arbitrary restrictions that only apply to one sex protects everyone's rights.

The reason the WI and Girl Guides had to change their policies is that they couldn't find any legal argument to support them, and the reason for that is that they were fundamentally based on sexist concepts of masculinity and femininity.

Yeah, she doesn't seem to have much imagination when it comes to how people might behave - which of course is part of the reason why she doesn't see what the trouble might be with allowing seemingly quiet and harmless transwomen in in the first place.

Mind you, now that I re-read it, I'm also irked by the fact that she seems to see nothing wrong with immensely restricting the spectrum of what women can discuss, simply in order to keep men out. "Just talk about things that don't interest/concern them and they won't come." Erm, what about all those other topics which appeal to women, but might also appeal to men? Are women not supposed to discuss them anymore, in order to keep the men out? Wouldn't it make more sense to, oh, I don't know, keep the men out first, and then discuss whatever you want among women only!? No, of course not. As usual, it's women who have to make themselves small in order to accomodate men. Grr.

(I know @MooPointCowsOpinion won't come back to this thread, but I'm bored :P )

if we class trans women as men, and then want to include them in a predominantly female space, we probably do have to offer the space out to cis men. Yucky. Not appealing at all.

It's not a matter of it being yucky or unappealing. It's not about feelings. It's about the concrete, factual needs for women to have women-only spaces at some points and for some things. Either you believe that those needs exist or you don't, but either way, it's not about feelings.

i think it makes more logical sense to class trans women as women, and maintain women only spaces that can then exclude cis men.

How would you propose to do that? How do you include transwomen and exclude men? On what practical basis? The only difference between a transwoman and a man is that one said, "I'm a woman". That's it; that's literally the only difference. I imagine you could have a mandatory declaration, for every person who comes through the door at a WI's meeting, to state, "I'm a woman." Of course, nothing would stop an ill-intentioned man from saying so.

A claus based on biological sex is hard to enforce

On the contrary: ask once and for all, "What sex were you observed to be at birth?" and that's it. Of course, ill-intentioned men could still lie, but they could then be challenged: they could be asked to produce an ID, for example, which would definitely settle the matter. No such possibility with, "I am a woman," which in practice doesn't mean anything if you think transwomen are women.

a clause based on being able to remove members based on expecting them to be female (inclusive) and follow basic decorum seems to make more logical sense.

How do you propose to remove members? On what practical basis? Would you remove a transwoman who insisted on talking about her penis? Would you keep a lying man who conducted himself perfectly properly beyond lying to get in? What criteria would you apply to keep the former yet somehow kick the latter out?

If my local WI wants to be more inclusive than your local WI, I don’t see why a judge should get to dictate how inclusive we want to be.

It's not about the judge. It's about the WI having declared itself a charity for women only, thus exclusive towards men. That is where the problem lies. The judge merely pointed out the obvious: women are adult human females. It was the WI which chose to restrict themselves to that category, and now they must follow through. They have legal ways to change their status, but until they do, they are the ones who decided to be exclusive towards male human beings, and you agreed to it when you became a member.

It feels like both sides hate being forced to follow an ideology they don’t believe in

The only one following an ideology here is you. GC women follow biology, which isn't an ideology to be believed or not, but simply a collection of facts.

we are all used to having more choice and freedom than this in this country.

Restricting one person's freedom to protect another person's rights is what the law is about. "Men can't get into women-only spaces" is a necessary restriction on men's freedom, in order to protect women's rights.