The Big Lie - how the WEP was always about gender rather than sex

[Ereshkigalangcleg]

An anonymous blog by a WEP insider hosted on Graham Linehan's website.

"^When the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) was co-founded in March 2015 by author Catherine Mayer and TV presenter Sandi Toksvig at the annual Women of the World festival, held at the Southbank Centre in London, tens of thousands of women rushed to join, feeling for the first time that a political party had been formed that was dedicated to us. After all, we were in the name!

Since then thousands of women have been leaving, feeling let down by a party that was meant to be for women & girls and our rights. But it is a mistake to think that WEP was captured by gender ideology – it was founded on gender ideology. We women will never ‘recapture’ it as it was never ours to begin with.^

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/the-big-lie?r=7vhv8&utmcampaign=post&utmmmedium=email&utmsource=copy

OMG this web chat with Catherine Mayer is chilling

A friend has just sent me the following, by Jo Bartosch, also worth a read:

Belatedly reading the feminist runes, in 2018 Sophie Walker presented a motion calling for open discussion of the GRA. The following year Sophie Walker left to head the Young Women’s Trust. Mandu Reid, who took over WEP in 2019, has been equivocal on the need for women’s sex-based rights. After her election as leader in 2019 Mandu told PinkNewsws_ that “trans women are women… (b)ut they’re women among a rich tapestry of what it means to be a woman, of which we all are a part.” This is of course a half-arsed cliché; “woman” isn’t some metaphorical soft furnishing; it is simply a biological category of sex.^

https://thecritic.co.uk/is-the-womens-equality-party-really-for-women/

@FindTheTruth, that webchat link doesn't go anywhere, now.

[quote Catmaiden]@FindTheTruth, that webchat link doesn't go anywhere, now. [/quote]
You need to remove the page number from the end of the link.

Poem on a WEP/mumsnet thread, shortly after Sophie had called us 'vicious'.
April 2016

The women’s Equality Party
Came skipping to Mumsnet one day
Politically, not very smarty
Expecting the ladies to play

Do these politicking people not know us?
Have they never encountered our like?
Do they think they can canvass our votes and
Not leave with their heads on a spike?

“Tell me your issues!” trilled Sophie
“We’re all about women, you see!
Our policies should win a trophy
I’m sure you will all vote for WE!”

How lovely said Mumsnet, but tell us
As women we’d just like to know
The way that you want to define us
Dictates how this webchat will go

“I see.” said our heroine “let’s see;
It’s nothing to do with your birth
Becoming a woman is messy
And different across the whole earth”

Erm replied Mumsnet, just hang on
We cannot get equality
As long as you don’t hear us bang on
It’s all about biology

It’s nothing to do with ‘becoming’
It’s not about identity
Our bodies have different plumbing
And not just the way that we wee

We bleed, and we birth and we breastfeed
We’re cut and we’re raped and oppressed
Abducted, enslaved and molested
And not because how we are dressed

Nothing to do with identity
Not because of ladybrain
When we are denied our autonomy
Our wombs are the public domain

Employers when they interview us
Ask “Is your family complete?”
They’re finding a way to then screw us
Offended that we dare compete

Jobs for the boys means biology
Votes for the boys meant just men
Changing the damn terminology
Still means it’s all about them

“Woman is anyone says so”
Bollocking tautology
And meanwhile the actual women
Are still fucked by biology

Don’t tell me my gender identity
Is the essence of what makes me ‘she’
That I share this with Johnny-come-lately
That we’re really the same, can’t I see?

My sex is what everyone notices
My sex is what used against me
My sex, and the women who share it
Are the ones who need equality

So Sophie, I hope that you heard us
For gender is purely fictitious
Sexism’s live and still kicking
Increasingly vile and pernicious

A party to fight for our sex
Now that would be something ambitious
But now what the fuck do we call it?
Since fighting for women is “vicious”?

I’m thinking of starting a party
To fight for the women like me
Who are angry, and cheated, and silenced
Who really just want to be free
Free from the shitstorm of gender
Free from denials of facts
Free from appeasing the bullies
Free from unworkable pacts
Free to say “This has defined me”
Free to say “You’re not the same”
Free to convene with my sisters
Free to reclaim my own name
Women means women means women
The people the world treats like scum
You’re born and you live and you die one
It isn’t a thing you become

It’s not that I’m lacking compassion
For the trans folk who have their own fights
I see that they have their own struggle
I support that they need their own rights

My needs and my life and my fight is not theirs
But they need me to say we’re the same
I need to define that I’m different from men
And it’s nothing to do with my brain

And so we have reached an impasse for today
I’ll leave you with this small footnote
The party that lets me define my own needs
Is the one who’ll be getting my vote.

Fabulous Barracker, thank you!

And so we have reached an impasse for today
I’ll leave you with this small footnote
The party that lets me define my own needs
Is the one who’ll be getting my vote.

And mine.

@Catmaiden does this work for you? need to go to page 2 to see what WE were saying. pretty dire replies.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/2890099-Webchat-with-Catherine-Mayer-author-and-co-founder-of-the-Womens-Equality-Party-Thursday-30-March-1-2pm

Fab poem. 💐

This thread is so interesting.

So, right from the start the WEP knew this was an issue - and carried on regardless. Incredible.

I had no idea about any of this stuff five years ago.

Love the poem.

Barracker did you write that poem? It's fab

It's so monumentally stupid. I don't know how these people have got the nerve to put pen to paper to express this crushing irrationality.

So often it seems to boil down to them having a friend or family member who's fallen for gender ideology hook line and sinker, so they tie themselves in knots attempting to explain how it all makes sense. It's always so blinkered, personal and ultimately selfish and so unfair to other women. I'm so disappointed.

That poem was written by

Ahem
"HairyGiantGibbousFlaps"

Actually I'm not disappointed, I'm livid. To found a party for women on that basis and then to conceal it, or at the very least to not be open about it!

It has always annoyed me that they have taken the spot of "women's party" that could have been filled by an actual party for women.

@FindTheTruth, thank you!

Weren't they supposed to be having a consultation recently on who should be classified as a woman?

Yes, a friend of mine participated in the Member's Assembly, which had video testimony from people on both sides of the argument including Dr Jane Clare Jones and Ruth Serwotka. I'm not sure what if anything is happening now, but it's not encouraging that the motion in favour of women's sex based rights was not allowed to be heard at their recent conference.

I see that in answer to 'can we define what a woman is' Catherine said -

There's a lot of confusion around definitions -- which is one reason I devote a whole chapter of the book to sex and gender

I don’t know why she wrote a whole chapter? All she had to say was, women are what men say they are, and well agree with them because we want them to like us. Simper simper.

well = we’ll

That poem is amazing!

Very sobering article, thanks for sharing Eresh.

This stood out for me - obvs I know this was fiction, but it seems to say a lot about Mayer’s ideology:

In Mayer’s brave new world, Equalia “elected a trans woman as Federal Prime Minister” which has “shed reductive notions of what it is to be female”.

So in a world where biologically male people dominate and have always dominated
in positions of power, one of the women who founded the WEP, which some might have thought would seek to redress that imbalance of power, actually thought it would be desirable in an imagined ideal world for the leader to be a biologically male person?

Unbelievable.

I've read the webchat threads now. With hindsight, it's blatantly clear, and Mumsnetters were onto it. In the March 2017 chat, Catherine Mayer CM actually says I don't believe secondary sex characteristics are a reliable determinant. .... We are all on a series of spectrums. ... What is absolutely clear is that people who identify as female are a huge structural disadvantage to people who identify as men

I'm still baffled as to why two women, one a lesbian and one who is feminist on at least some issues, should set up a women's party that would always prioritise men's wishes above women's needs.

@Barracker

That poem was written by Ahem "HairyGiantGibbousFlaps"