This policy seems odd, do we need self ID, after all we all know Wales is the most Trans friendly place in the UK for politicians.. We know Welsh Trans politicians can be elected here. We are the only the country to ever have a Trans MP - Jamie Wallis, the Tory MP for Bridgend of car crash in dress and pearls fame.
The only reason this is needed is fromorbit is firstly: because Welsh Labour want to change to a party list system instead of a constituency candidate system in the next Senedd elections, to ensure that it’s political parties which control who gets elected rather than constituents controlling that, and to ensure that any list member who defects to another party mid term (like Ash Regan has just done in Scotland) gets booted out of the Senedd and replaced by whoever’s next on that party’s list without triggering a by-election, and without the party they’ve defected to benefiting from their defection (like Alba has just done). In other words Welsh Labour, in collaboration with Plaid Cymru, want to make sure that all candidates’ first and only loyalty is to the party which puts their name on the list, not to constituents/ voters. I haven’t seen any of the opposition parties point out how anti democratic that is. Presumably because they are quite keen on political parties having that control too.
And then secondly: because Welsh Labour want to make sure that the 50% of the population who are female are represented in the Senedd at those next elections. But because they won’t/can’t tackle the reasons why women might be less likely to seek election, less likely to be selected as a candidate by a political party, or less likely to be elected if they are selected, they have gone into their default mode of “let’s pass a law about it”. So once you decide that you are going to pass a law that says that half of political party candidates on a list must be women, then you have to define in that law who gets to be eligible for inclusion in the “woman” half of the list.
The huge irony of course is that, whilst they are wholly committed to their (imo completely sincere) wish for women to be represented, they are also at the very same time even more strongly committed to their total refusal to be truthful about biology and are aggressively self-righteous about their self-perception as “progressive” and morally superior to any individual, group, or political party who stands up for the right of female humans to be recognised as women and for women to be recognised as a group that never includes males.
To be able to continue to regard themselves as the good guys whilst simultaneously being dishonest with the electorate, Welsh Labour have to exclude and refuse to engage with any group which disagrees with them, and also to defame and denigrate them as ignorant, bigoted, far right adjacent, and engaging in a culture war. Referring to opponents as shrill is another tactic.
Another point to bear in mind is that: even if they avoided the whole “what’s a woman” question by using “female” and “male” in the legislation, the ‘what about a person with a GRC question?’ would still arise.
TLDR version: i) legally enforced electoral candidate quotas are a stupid and lazy ‘solution’; ii) they’ve brought this mess on themselves iii) they are unlikely to back down.