Janice Turner on the fall of the WEP

[Clymene]

Women who can’t define a woman are sunk.

I'm quite sad about this - what a great opportunity, absolutely squandered. This is the best line: Self-ID is not a political position, it’s a religious belief.

Sums up the whole shebang in one sentence.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1c1b5b50-727a-11ed-8a5b-f385de7508fe?shareToken=c7c078c58c63ba46fd6d5d4724d389122_

Go woke: go broke.

Well done Mandu.

Self-ID is not a political position, it’s a religious belief.

Absolutely. And when genderism is enforced in law, that country is no longer a democracy but a theocracy. And we know what happens in a theocracy. Especially to women.

Walker made a common error: thinking she could navigate a middle path on this issue. But either you believe biological sex is material, immutable and an axis of women’s oppression, or you don’t. Self-ID is not a political position, it’s a religious belief.

I think that whole paragraph sums up the problem for the fence sitters.

Reid says we “shouldn’t make policy based on outliers”

Err yes we should and we do, it's called safeguarding.

Some suggest policy was heavily influenced by the fact that its only remaining major financial donor, Jon Skeet, is the outspoken parent of a trans child. (Reid dismisses this as “nonsense”.)

This happens so often. Not just the money, but the parents becoming these evangelicals who must spread the word and change the world for their child.

Yep. Read this today. Cancelled my WEP membership about 5 minutes later. Will admit to not being the most active of members but was pleased to think that I was funding a feminist political party. I will not fund a party that promotes the cause of self-id.

Hate what is happening in schools and to young people. Am lucky to be a senior leader, so have some influence, but am also very aware on the pressures on us to fall in line with the agenda promoted by Stonewall and Mermaids.

So glad to have found this board as it has really opened my eyes to the broader issues.

Yes, I was going to vote for WEP in the last election til I realised they'd gone all TWAW. Nope.

Reid says we “shouldn’t make policy based on outliers”

I'm seeing that all over social media recently, even Charlotte Proudman posted a version the other day. It feels like an attack on safeguarding to me.
If it isn't and they intend something else as the outcome, they need to stop and come up with something different. Something more direct and transparent.

Charlotte Proudman is a TRA. She has set up an org with the fox killer which has several aims, one of which is to give 'trans women fundamental human rights'. Not all trans people, just transwomen. I'm guessing that means full access to women's sports and single sex spaces.

They are irrelevant and pointless

Well I am pleased, at least women will not be misled any more by a party claiming one thing and doing another ( that’s a sad attempt at a joke btw)

Of course it does mean I won’t have anywhere to put my X in the next election. So congratulations wokers, you have in effect disenfranchised a generation of women, I am sure it wasn’t your intention, or maybe it was.

Some suggest policy was heavily influenced by the fact that its only remaining major financial donor, Jon Skeet, is the outspoken parent of a trans child. (Reid dismisses this as “nonsense”.)

Glad to see this undue influence highlighted in MSM, I think Skeet was identified as a major financial donor on FWR first

Mandu is getting about. Despite support for self-ID wasn't Mandu somehow at BP as part of the UN's 16 Days of Activism?

I'd say it's outrageous and then I recall the UN's equivocal understanding of women and girls despite their declaration of VAWG as a public health issue.

www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/unite/16-days-of-activism

Jo Bartosch in the Torygraph is having a go at WEP as well, saying that ordinary women are rejecting an elite feminism that cannot even define them.
snip:
neither Reid, nor indeed any of the class of professional feminist, have found a media slot to defend the ordinary women who have been vilified for saying that biological sex matters.
This is because WEP reject the definition of “woman” as simply an “adult human female” in favour of the idea that any biological male who says he’s a woman should be treated as such. This was confirmed at last month’s conference, where delegates voted to support a system of gender self-identification; transforming the slogan “transwomen are women” into policy. This is about as logical as the Communist Party failing to define ‘worker’ lest it upset industrialists who identify as proletarians.

paywall busted
archive.ph/sbyLN

Janice Turner records that a source tells her they may be down to 8,000 members, and that figure is presented as staggeringly few. Yet it dwarfs the number of women and men who were able to attend the conference and vote on the Self-ID motion. I understand a political party cannot do everything by post, but something as important as supporting self-ID should have been opened up to all the members. It's not democratic to restrict it only to members who can attend conference.

Women are under-represented in party politics in other parties. Various reasons for this, including that childcare responsibilities disproportionately fall on mothers, and care of elderly parents disproportionally falls on daughters. This means women have less time to be political animals, and giving up an entire weekend to attend a conference, even an online version, may be simply impossible. Doesn't mean they don't have views on policies, and aren't entitled to vote on the direction of the party. Especially when they are paying to be members.

extract from a letter hosted by Glinner

At a WEP conference, only members who attend party conference are allowed to vote on policies. This may be how it is done in other parties, but WEP had promised to “do politics differently”. When you have a few hundred women in a room (it can be a minimum of 70 – section 4.3 of the constitution), who are told by leaders, steering or executive committee officers why this or that motion is fabulous and are only given a few minutes to read the wording and decide on it, it makes it far more likely the motions that get through will be the ones approved by the party leadership.

Glinner's Substack

This is because WEP reject the definition of “woman” as simply an “adult human female” in favour of the idea that any biological male who says he’s a woman should be treated as such. This was confirmed at last month’s conference, where delegates voted to support a system of gender self-identification; transforming the slogan “transwomen are women” into policy. This is about as logical as the Communist Party failing to define ‘worker’ lest it upset industrialists who identify as proletarians.

I love the comparison

Thank you for posting. I have been very disappointed in WEP. There are so many issues that affect women disproprtionately and they could have been such a force for change. Lost opportunity.

So congratulations wokers, you have in effect disenfranchised a generation of women, I am sure it wasn’t your intention, or maybe it was.

Wokers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains....

Funnily enough I managed to vote at the National Trust's AGM despite not attending in person.
I was a WEP member until recently. Not involved with my local branch as the leader was TWAW but thought I could at least contribute and get involved nationally somehow. No contact from them in the 3 or 4 years I was a member, until I cancelled my DD.
i thought they could at least have organised a group to the Pregnant then Screwed marches but nothing on the FB pages either.

Such a shame.

👏

Taswama

The National Trust must have a greater commitment to democracy than the WEP does, or be more scared its members will leave if they feel taken for granted.

The social media exultation over the Self-ID motion has rankled with me. It's like seeing a GCSE Statistics question, with people merrily congratulating themselves on getting the answer wrong in public! If 83% of people attending a weekend long conference are in favour, that does not mean 83% of the wider membership are in favour, because you do not have a bloody representative sample.

Still less does it mean that 83% of the UK's female population as a whole are in favour! Yes, I saw that interpretation.

What next? Shall we survey the Labour party members at their conference to ask what percentage would want Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, and then, when 83% say yes please, declare that 83% of all UK voters want Keir Starmer as the next Prime Minister?

This, 100%.