Sympathies, this approach must have a horrible feeling of inevitability around it. Women’s spaces and services are consistently under attack.
But you are in a good position to speak to others being so closely connected with it. And the good thing is at least you now know about it before anyone’s said yes.
Maybe you could start with saying that while you accept that clearly not everyone believes that it’s impossible for human beings to change sex, that this is a question that challenges the charity’s purpose at its heart and which deserves very serious consideration with close service user and staff involvement. Not just a trustee decision in isolation.
You have very serious concerns that your charity will risk deterring many service users with the ‘bigger problems’ from accessing its services, because many women don’t want to be in the proximity of men, however those men identify and however nice they are. This view will include the most vulnerable women and women with no other alternative options for finding help than your charity, but could include any woman. There are lots of reasons which could happen to any woman, which might make them feel this way. Also you know that those running the charity believe that women should be entitled to access its service with privacy, safety and dignity, so why should this be jeopardised in order to admit men?
Secondly do your relatives or those running the charity know that the Stonewall umbrella includes everyone? They will be saying the charity will support everyone if they let in men. There can be no more filter based on keeping the charity single-sex. So this means by making the services unisex you can’t reduce the risk of sexual attack and harassment pre-emptively any more. They will be raising the likelihood of these things happening to women because all men will have to be admitted, however the men identify.
There’s also a very strong argument from fairness: No charity has infinite resources, and presumably this one fundraises publicly, including substantially from your own family, on the basis of being set up specifically to benefit women? Why should women’s services exhaust finite women’s resources, then, in order to support men?
If the brave stunner person is so likely to attract a positive response then they are completely free to set up their own separate charity based on their own needs and experiences, to benefit their own community (
exactly as has been done here with your charity, to benefit women only).
Your charity also needs to consider whether- however much it would like to help- in its experience of working with women, if it has really gathered the relevant expertise to deal with this person’s needs and experiences? Doesn’t your charity normally refer people with specific needs to the specific charity for that type of need or section of the community? Why is this specific case any different?
Your charity was set up for women who face completely different challenges and disadvantages to men due to female biology, and because of the the weaponisation of gender against them based on their sex due to sexism/patriarchal thinking.
Then.. if your relative is too ill or the whole thing too far away to have a proper conversation about this on an informal level then could you look at the founding legal documents of the charity and raise some technical questions?
If the charity’s set up to benefit women then it will say so clearly somewhere.
You don’t say where you are, but in most places where charities are regulated, the charity can’t just change its own remit unless (eg in England) it’s ‘in the best interest of the charity’ and the trustees need to agree to such a change. More here:
www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-make-changes-to-your-charitys-governing-document
Given that already your charity can be helping transgender or non binary or detransitioned service users who were born female.... does your ill relative and the far- away trustees want to help transgender people including those born male AND all men however they identify so much that they will either potentially have to wind up this existing charity with all the disruption and expense of that and then to establish a new charity from scratch (so as to allow all men to be service users) with all the time and expense and need for new expertise that doing that would entail?
Alternatively, do they want to admit men anyway under the current legal set up for women and and so risk deterring actual and future women service users and potentially not meeting the needs of the transwoman individual who has approached them?
If they do wish to do that, when are they planning to undertake a possibly very expensive review of their insurance policies and of the employment terms of the charity staff?
How do they plan to mitigate for the loss of staff expertise if staff and volunteers resign over this? What about the loss of future attraction of good quality staff and volunteers who want to work in women’s services?
And presumably the charity are resourced to work transparently around this so they will be undertaking a full consultation of service users and the public before they make such a change, and will publish the results all of which will take several months?
And are they resourced during all this on social media and in their press office and leadership team and within the Trustees to respond to the public critique and debate that this proposal to admit male-born people will attract?
Plus to rectify the loss of the charity’s reputation for good governance if it went ahead and made such a change against its own governing documents?
How would it deal with other donors pulling out over this fundamental change of policy?
Is it financially prepared and confident enough in its own reputation to have to defend legal cases that it might attract around making a change of this kind, as will soon be happening with the Girl Guides UK?
Sorry for the massive post, I’m sure we could all add even more things that they would need to think about though..
Good luck with it 