I don't know if you or your staff will ever read this, but here goes.
I was really impressed that you came to the Women's Place meeting in London yesterday. I was sitting with a big group of MNers, to your left, and I don't think any of us had any idea at all that you were there. It can't have been easy for you, sitting in that room and hearing hundreds of feminists hiss and boo whenever the WEP was mentioned by any speaker. I can't imagine you ever envisaged that when you started up an avowedly feminist political party. You were brave to stand up after that.
I was sorry you didn't stay until the end. I understand it, but I think it's a real pity.
But, but, but. It's no use taking notes and saying you are listening, if you don't take any account of what women are actually saying to you. I don't know either you or Heather Brunskell-Evans personally, but what I see from the outside is that one of you is willing to be transparent about what went on in the WEP, and one of you is hiding behind procedure as a way of avoiding transparency. It's not enough for you to shout out "that's not true" when Heather is talking, if you aren't prepared to speak on this yourself. It was clear to me that Heather would give you permission to publish, so why don't you? Because the reality is that so many women - at that meeting and elsewhere - have been threatened and hounded and ostracised and censured for saying pretty unremarkable things (such as "maybe we should think carefully before sterilising gender nonconforming children") that of course we are going to take Heather's side. So many of us have been there already.
You say that the WE formulates policy slowly, and that you are listening, but we here have been trying to talk to you about this since at least November 2015, and the ill-fated Guest Post from Sandi Toksvig. How long do you expect to take on this? Sandi wrote "Join us, share your ideas" and then buggered off, not leaving even one party member of the then alleged 50K members to bother to discuss ideas and answer questions with us. (This is what we had to say then, in case you'd like to know: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/2502963-Guest-post-Sandi-Toksvig-The-time-is-right-for-the-Womens-Equality-Party?pg=1)
That was more than two years ago. How long, seriously, do you expect us to give you to formulate a coherent policy on these issues, when in the meantime your actions have show again and again that you are prepared to throw women under the bus? As the mighty Datun said at yesterday's meeting, sadly after you'd left, "Shit, or get off the pot".
There was one point during the meeting last night where I consciously thought "blimey this is it - I'm witnessing the last gasp of the WEP before its unhappy demise". I don't know whether that's true. I don't know whether you can row back from this. But you are now, for good or for ill, a player on the political stage, and you have, still, the goodwill of many women. (Although not nearly as many as you had at the start, I can promise you that.) You got off on a bad foot with MNers right from the start, and we could reasonably expect to be your natural allies, even those of us with existing loyalties to other political parties. How can you hope to be a mainstream political party if you are unable to talk successfully with us?
Where do you go from here?