From the 50:50 Parliament website....
Why do we want a 50:50 Parliament?
Parliament is meant to be a representative institution. As a result, it should draw upon the widest possible pools of talent and experience reflecting our nation. There are 32 million women living in the UK, they account for 51% of the population. Women make a massive contribution to society in their paid and unpaid work. They merit fair representation and inclusion in the most important decision-making institution in our country.
All political parties and over 50,000 signatories to the 50:50 petition agree that a gender balanced Parliament would be more representative and better informed. 50:50 aims to inspire, encourage and support women in being elected to Westminster and is asking Parliament and all the political parties to work on solutions.
We need the best of both, men and women at Westminster. Let’s build a better democracy together!
it all sounds so reasonable (except for swapping gender and sex)
Does the gender of my MP matter (given UK is a representative democracy)?
It is true that MPs represent their constituents and men can represent women and women can represent men. But as Joni Lovenduski, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London observed in a paper she presented at the Speakers Conference 2012: “Evidence from more balanced legislatures than ours shows that as membership of women increases so does the sensitivity of male MPs to the range of women’s concerns. So men can act for women, but they may be more likely to do so when there are more women around.”
So they actually have evidence that sex matters.
It all sounds ideal, yet somehow they have done the mental gymnastics required to equate the situation women face with the life experience of people who have lived the vast majority of their lives as male and maybe unwittingly, or inadvertently, are totally raison d'etre for the 50:50 campaign.
Is it a sympathy position from successful women that feel like they have reached a privileged position in life and have rights to burn?
In a thread of 800+ posts with two helpful respondents putting forward their case, we still haven't established the tiniest justification for why people like Robin or Sue Pascoe can presume to speak for us or have any real inkling or interest in our challenges.
They have obviously faced their own, possibly significant challenges in life, but they are not our challenges. I will never experience the challenge of feeling like I am feeling wrong in a male body, or the challenge of how to tell my wife that I am leaving her to live a completely different life as a member of the opposite sex, or how to tell my children the same.
I will never experience what it is like to being treated better by society because I am male, regardless of whether I want to be male or not.
Looking at Sue's history, it is obvious that claiming to have a female identity while living in a male body, still doesn't negate the benefits of male socialisation and how society views you.
It very much appears that Sue, however reluctantly, has benefited greatly from the effects of male socialisation in their career progression - without any of the obstacles that women face.
So there is literally zero overlap between Sue's identity challenges and our 'being of the female sex' challenges - women generally don't even get as far as wondering about our identity - we are too busy dealing with the challenges of our sex.
conservativewomen.uk/articles/about-sue/