There aren’t any trans people in parliament, so there may well be a case for parties to work on expanding representation.
There is no case for having parliamentary shortlists to specifically promote people whose only shared characteristic is that they subscribe to an anti-woman, anti-child, anti-gay, anti-science belief system.
Goddamm it. I wish feminists would stop unthinkingly pushing the idea of shortlists for trans-identified people, in an effort to deflect accusations of 'transphobia'. In the current political climate, it could very well happen, and the prospect ought to rightly terrify any feminist who thinks it about it for five seconds: it would mean extreme anti-woman, anti-child protection, anti-free speech trans ideology would become entrenched in the very structure of political parties and thus the parliament. You can't reason against and defeat this ideology because the people who subscribe to it have mandated representation at the highest levels of politics, which they will use to ruthlessly promote their ideology and suppress all dissent against it. You'd be in the situation of the Iranian women's movement, trying to use the political system to fight against a patriarchal religious ideology whose mullahs have entrenched representation in that same system.
Even setting aside the extremely adverse affect that shortlists for trans-identifed people would have on women, it makes no sense from a pro-minority perspective either. The rationale behind all-women shortlists isn't to fight discrimination per se, but is predicated on the logic that women make up half the population, and therefore the proportional parliamentary make up ought to reflect this. That's why the legal exemption allowing the creation of AWS has a specific timeframe (expires in 2030 I believe) and also why there aren't any shortlists to promote ethnic minorities or disabled people, even though both groups undoubtedly suffer from structural barriers to political representation. If you are going to go down the route of having positive discrimination for every under-represented minority, shouldn't you start with the ones who make up a more significant proportion of the population than 0.3 per cent, and have shared objective characteristics, rather than a shared belief system?
Speaking of which, there is no evidence that trans-identified people suffer from any structural barriers in politics. Unlike being female, black or disabled, being trans is not an embodied experience that a person can't identify in or out of - it is purely a matter of self-declaration. So how can we know that there are no trans-identified people currently in parliament? Many TIMs don't come out until well into middle age. Half the male parliamentarians might be closeted 'transwomen' for all we know. Hell, the UK might have even had a 'transwoman' prime minister or two. And as we have seen with Madigan, Peto, Bergdorf et al., TIMs get fast-tracked to positions of political power based on nothing but their trans status: they get promoted over vastly more qualified women and then excused for incompetent and/or appalling behaviour that women - and for that matter non-trans-identified men - would never get away with.
The reason 'transmen' are nowhere to be seen in politics is not just because, like all women, they face structural sexism, but because the patriarchal religious ideology to which they subscribe demands total female subordination to male interests. TIFs are not and never will be a priority for the trans movement, but that doesn't mean feminists should work on getting them into parliament, any more than we would want shortlists to promote fundamentalist Muslim or Christian women.
Gah. It will be ironic, but entirely in keeping with the nightmarish Black Mirror trajectory we are on, if the outcome of this AWS rebellion by women is the creation of trans-specific shortlists, whose effect will be to formally cement gender identity ideology as the new state-sponsored patriarchal religion of the modern West.