The absolute cognitive dissonance of “TWAW” vs “their stated aims” is absolutely staggering. And absurd.
The MWF was 100 in 2017 & in amongst the press coverage this article included:
^Over the last 100 years, the Federation has campaigned on the rights of married woman to work, have access to contraception, abortion, FGM and, more recently, flexible working for women doctors. The role of MWF today is still as important. Over 55 per cent of medical students are now female and 53 per cent of consultant trainees are women, as well as 69 per cent of GP trainees.
Despite this success, there still exists a gender gap at senior levels within medicine. A 2015 study revealed that female medical students would earn 35 per cent less than male graduates by the age of 55. Currently, only 34 per cent of consultants are women and within surgery this drops to just 12 per cent. Women also only make up 24 per cent of Trust medical directors and 24 per cent of professors.^
All of that is relevant ONLY to biological women. The MWF do a huge amount of very valuable work for women in medicine & about women’s health (eg joint work with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine that included looking at the lack of clinical trials including women). Trans women have needs that are absolutely important - but it is not up to the MWF to divert their resources into meeting them & it would be a desperate shame (to say the least) were they to do so. As/while the MWF are not working to meet the discrete needs of trans women, the TWAW line is simply about offering “validation”, which is not what the MWF is meant to do. I can’t find any information on their having polled their members on the matter, either, so it seems that this is (yet another) top-down decision to use women as props without their consent.
The MWF do not offer any membership statistics either - being the largest organisation for women in medicine in the UK isn’t so impressive when you lack competition. In 2008 they had 1200 members (according to Wikipedia) - in 2020 there were 140.5 thousand women on the medical register in the UK; & while the number of female doctors has been increasing, it’s not leapt up THAT wildly since 2008 (according to the King’s Fund, 43% of the UK’s doctors were women by 2011). Thus, even if the MWF were right about their membership’s views (& allowing for its having increased in proportion, obviously) it is disingenuous of them to try to claim knowledge of the views of the majority of female doctors given nowhere near a majority are members of MWF.