It’s too early to tell in a lot of cases OP. The new government haven’t been in power a week yet and there are hundreds of new MPs. This is not a priority issue for action until women make it one by writing to MPs asking them for meetings and give them some time to respond in writing. This takes time and most women are doing this in their free time which is a scarce commodity.
We could start by compiling the list of champions by checking off all the supportive MPs of all parties who attended that Westminster Hall debate (FWR had threads on this) to see who of those have kept their seats, Those are a useful core group because they are experienced MPs who have GC sympathies so that’s helpful.
Those are our initial champions especially the Labour ones who are now in government. And regardless of party their challenge is to respond to women’s concerns in a tangible reality based way. We want them ultimately to change the law so that it protects women and children’s rights. It passes to Labour to lead on this now they are in government, because this is not what the Tories did in government, despite apparently ‘knowing what a women is’.
The Tories gave us the very credible threat of introducing self ID to the UK then pulled back and just brought in the £5 GRA. That is a really upsetting prioritisation degrading of all the women’s experiences which they were told about for 14 years. The Tories kicked the GRA reform question into the long grass meaning it could be revived at any time not in a good way for women. That’s all they did despite having some good individual MPs. The core support at the top wasn’t there.
By now I think times have changed and the groundswell of public opinion is demonstrably with women on this. And MPs need to be reassured that the public will support them if they uphold safeguarding while supporting women (especially lesbians and detransitioned women) and children’s rights because that’s the right thing to do. And that the public do not agree with MPs privileging men who just want to get in with women and children in vulnerable situations.
So we now move on to the new and in many cases untested MPs. Writing either as an individual or better yet as a joint thing from your local women’s group (if you have a Resisters group or similar where you are), we need to all write to ask our new local MP for a meeting and test the water with them.
I would suggest also that everyone doing this send the results of that meeting to a national GC organisation like Sex Matters to encourage them to compile a national list that is regularly updated with what they know about how MPs respond and vote on these issues. National groups often don’t want to make the outcome information public for various reasons because some conversations are better privately initially so who knows maybe a MN thread with just a sparse note of who has met up with who might be a good way for women on here to hold MPs to account.
The asks of what action we want should be coordinated per MP ideally (because they will be less likely to speak with their ministers and ask them to act if the asks we make for change are unclear or contradictory) but I’ll leave that to others to suggest how best to do that.
it’s an exciting time to have new MPs to discuss this with. I think it was a false sense of security before (if you had that) with the old ones because of all the inertia. But there’s been a sea change out there now and we have new MPs to move this forward if they will. So the only way to know is by writing and asking them.
Much easier for government to move on contentious issues before they have made loads of statements on that issue and they risk losing face by having to change their view publicly. It’s going to be hard enough to make change on this issues because sexism and cancel culture is so rife so it’s good for us to start as soon as possible with asking local MPs about this.