Trans row threatens to overshadow Lib Dem conference

[IwantToRetire]

Sir Ed Davey faces activist revolt over party rules that allow biological men to take women’s posts

The current rules allow those who “self-identify as women” to stand for party posts set aside for women, which the activists say dilutes the chance that biological women can reach the top of the party.

The vote will be put before conference on Saturday, but it is understood that trans rights activists will try to get it cancelled to avoid embarrassment. This is despite a YouGov poll showing that three-quarters of Lib Dem members do not support the party’s stance on allowing gender self-ID.

Full article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/17/trans-row-threatens-to-overshadow-lib-dem-conference/

Also at https://archive.is/hykSr

Of course it makes no sense. So a ‘non binary person’ can be counted towards either percentage? really? Whoever came up with this nonsense probably assumed everyone would understand it to mean ‘male nonbinary’ in the men’s 40% and ‘female nonbinary’ in the women’s 40% minimum, but they can’t say that because nonbinary people pretend to be above such categorisation.
(Do the greens still have their ‘non men /non women’ categorisation?)

This will be good to watch! I left the party because of their awful policies towards women. Plus a disturbing interaction with a member of my local party on Twitter.

They are totally captured.

'Trans row threatens to overshadow Lib Dem conference
GOOD!'

Couldn't agree more. All political parties have had this coming for years. They just have to get their heads out of their arses and start engaging with reality, and the Supreme Court judgement should be making that EASIER for them

In some constituencies it's going to be a fight between reform and the lib dems. They have a chance to become the sensible party that people can vote for. They could blow that by letting the TRAs take over.

I worry that the senior LDs have spent so long parroting TA dogma that they feel they can’t back down. The press have the receipts and would crucify them (well, apart from the BBC and the Guardian). They have painted themselves into a corner. Much as I’d like to see them utterly humiliated for all they have put women through we need to start building some golden bridges so these idiots people who have seen sense can move over.

LibDem's main funding is apparently declared to be from the pharma company which produces 'sex-change' drugs for children.
So...whatever could explain their law-defying, membership- defying, fact- denying, Cass- Report- denying, policy?

This!

This needs to be shouted louder.

Lib Dems main funding was from drug companies, last time I looked they hadnt had recent big donations. https://donation.watch/en/unitedkingdom/party/LIBDEMS/donors

Also https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2015-04-09/general-election-2015-lib-dems-lead-list-of-donations-in-britains-top-20-marginal-seats-tories-third

Ed Davey

Ed Davey refuses 10 times to say women cannot have penises https://share.google/JabGIuDTy4ACnBGuJ archive link

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/18/ed-davey-women-penises/

FFS!

Wow perfect example of what I was just saying. The Lib Dems are going to look increasingly absurd if they keep this up. Is Davey going to be doing this for the next years?

Look what happened to Your party. If anyone gets to say the truth the whole gender thing becomes unstable.

Meanwhile Tim Farron also looks stupid in an interview. Women do exist actually.

Times Radio
https://x.com/TimesRadio/status/1968582386184040541

“The party will not have a debate to allow itself to do something that’s illegal.”

timfarron says the inclusion of transgender women on Lib Dem party committees would be “compliant with the law.”

The only reason they say all this is that, as men, the definition of women doesn’t matter to them. They should be asked if they would have a sexual relationship with a penis woman. That’s the only consequence men like this understand.

Very good luck to them. Some fabulous women in the libdems. I'd love the party to return to sanity, and I could vote for them again.

So he's an idiot.

I actually feel for Tim Farron. He's almost certainly GC and thinks it's bollocks on a personal level. However he was targeted previously over his religious beliefs and he was effectively forced to set down as leader. Despite his own personal views maybe being different on a number of subjects he has always behaved like a liberal and encouraged debate and represented the line that has been built by consensus. He is in a bind to challenge (which I actually think he has privately).

Back story. Back in 2017 in the aftermath of the 2017 election, a faction of the LIb Dem took it upon themselves to oust him because of his Christian values and the fact he personally regarded homosexuality as sinful. If you look at his voting record and his conduct he certainly didn't reflect his own beliefs.

But I do believe there's more to the story and the bonkers LGBT+ Lib Dems had a witch hunt against him.

The MP announced his resignation as party leader on Wednesday, saying he had become “the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in”.

“The consequences of the focus on my faith is that I have found myself torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a political leader”, he added.

His resignation came just hours after that of the party's openly gay Home Affairs spokesman, Lord Brian Paddick, citing "concerns about the leader's views on various issues".
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tim-farron-resigns-liberal-democrat-gay-rights-lgbt-chris-cooke-tension-lord-paddick-a7796321.html

Now Brian Paddock is an interesting character at this point. He's openly gay and was being heavily influenced by the LGBT+ Lib Dems at the time.

Now the Radical Association were just getting to a point of significant influence at the time. They were effectively the LDs answer to Momentum and seen as 'the future of the party's and were heavily dominated by a clique - that largely centred on the LGBT+ LDs and their mates.

Hey look at this from the above article about Tim Farron

Former head of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, Chris Cooke, made unsubstantiated complaints to the party about Farron's personal conduct when "drunk", and admitted that he "made up a story to cause trouble" following his suspension over Twitter comments directed at Conservative MP Anna Soubry.

The student nurse tweeted that the Broxtowe MP he hoped she would not “escape the noose” over her expenses claims after it was revealed she was one of several Conservative MPs embroiled in the scandal over the party’s expense claims during the 2015 election

She screen-grabbed the tweet and her local constituency party complained to the local Lib Dems.

He later tweeted his Twitter account and friends said he had not meant to threaten her – he was just expressing a hope she would be arrested or lose her seat.

Mr Cooke, from Bramcote in Nottingham, admitted that he had sent an email to party bosses with a complaint about Mr Farron's personal conduct while “drunk” and has since retracted.

He told the Mail on Sunday: “I felt betrayed by the party and was drunk at the time.

“It is an email I regretted sending and have retracted.

“I was just p*ed off with my suspension over a non-issue and made up a story to cause trouble.”

The contents of the complaint have not been revealed but senior Lib Dems told the Mail that, although they knew them to be untrue, it compounded their alarm about Mr Farron’s inability to breakthrough during the election campaign which they blamed on the ongoing row over his religion.

Hmmm. Doesnt this all hit a bit of a nerve, when repeated back in September 2025 and the context of certain vexatious TRAs and rising concerns about the rhetoric of killing politicians?

AND

“Many people thought Farron was not only a liability in terms of his anti-gay views but not liberal or Left-wing enough”, he said. “‘There was a section of the party that were simply out to get him."

By any means necessary. It was a witch-hunt.

Let's go back to Paddick.

Paddick, a former Police officer at the MET, subsequently got heavily involved early on with the row over GC voices in the party and bullying in the party which was going on at the end of 2017/ start of 2018. He was very much involved at the time of Natalie Bird's election as co-chair of the Radical Association and subsequent treatment within the party. He apparently tried to smooth things over between 'both sides' but I don't actually believe much of this. He was far too heavily sat on and influenced by the LGBT+ Lid Dems in the end. My feeling was he was a useful idiot for TRAs because he could be manipulated by the whole 'its just like being gay' stuff and trying to be down with the kids he didn't ask the right questions at the right time.

I must admit to thinking, I wonder what he thinks of everything now in the context of all the subsequent developments. He left the LDs in 2023 to take on a non partisan roll but still sits in the Lords.

This is basically all about the Radical Association and the LGBT+ Lib Dems who at the time were all mates and all pretty much full on TRA and their dominance in the party and the degree of influence they had. At the time members of the LGBT+ LD pretty much had members on most of the LD federal groups which manage the party. These were almost all men and those who weren't were trans / non-binary (one notable exception to this). It always struck me, that they were the people with the most time on their hands to volunteer to the party - women with children just didn't have a chance. They had a strangle hold on it. Farron, ironically, was pointing out at the time that the LDs had a 'stale, pale and male' problem. Which this absolutely echoed.

I don't believe Farron was targeted purely because of his views on homosexuality. It was just easier to openly oust him on this basis rather than on the wider TWAW thing. In hindsight, he probably wasn't MRA enough either. He just wasn't authoritarian enough for them, they couldn't control him as he wasn't 'one of theirs' and he was seen as an issue precisely because he was liberal and tried to enable debate within the party. It wasn't just how he came across in 2017 to the electorate. The LD were always going to get squeezed out because of the dynamics of that particular election and them making themselves a single issue party who were looking increasingly detached from the electorate and increasing inflexible and undemocratic.

It's interesting that Natalie Bird's harassment came not long after Farron's departure and just as we entered the height of no debate. There were many LDs who believed in leaving the EU or thought that the LDs were becoming too 'liberal identity' - you all must believe the tick box of right think - who left the party at that time after a massive upsurge in members in the immediate aftermath of Brexit.

So if you understand this, you understand perhaps why Farron has towed the line. If I'm honest, I'm surprised he ever stayed in the party after the way he was treated. Most others would have walked in his shoes.

I am more forgiving of him than most I think as a result, because I think he's already been a victim of the anti liberal bullshit in the party and was actively targeted by the LGBT+ Lib Dems, including at least one who actively told straight up lies about him to cause shit. And admitted to it.

Alternatively, scrap them and get new people. I'd find it hard to trust people who have been this stupid and/or mendacious.

The thing is though, people who don't agree with the Lib Dems' stance on gender need to stop bloody voting for them.

The Lib Dems are still coasting on their long held but no longer deserved reputation for being sensible centrists.

If voters stopped saying, "Oh well I'm going to vote for the Lib Dems as usual because they're the sensible ones in the middle and I can't abide extremism" and actually fucking researched the Lib Dems' current policies, they'd realise that the Lib Dems are extremists.

This.

I have vote for them in the past, not now, obviously.

Last time I knowingly spoke to a Lib De it was a local elected councillor at a Trans Rights Protest. I asked him what rights trans people didn't have and he just looked at me and refused to answer. (To be fair, silence is better than trying to answer if your entire position is nonsense - he did do what was most likely to convince me of his position).

As I was leaving I had the lesbian wife of a TIM get very angry with me for laughing at the notion she was in a lesbian relationship.

I used to vote for them in most elections, boycotted them for a couple of years after tuition fees (which coincided with the local Lib Dem candidate being suspended and an excellent independent candidate standing a couple of times) and then voted for them again in 2019, which was just before JK Rowling's infamous Maya Forstater tweet and my gender critical awakening.

I don't like to say I'll never vote for them again because I think politics is a long term game and it's silly to imagine that you already know who you will or won't want to vote for in 20 or 30 years' time.

But at the same time, I forgave them for throwing young people under the bus over tuition fees, I'm not sure I can forgive them for throwing women under the bus as well. It's kind of a "fool me once, fool me twice" sort of thing.

In fairness, I wrote to my local Lib Dem candidate in 2024 to express my concerns about gender issues. I was willing to listen to what he had to say. He didn't bother to reply so I spoiled my ballot paper. He came within about 100 votes of unseating the Tories in my constituency for the first time since it was created in 1982. But a miss is as good as a mile, isn't it?

All political parties need to stop prioritising men’s sexual rights and access to women and children, which is obviously an extremist position.
Lib Dems are winning in this because they are lower profile so their man pleasing policies are less well known. The Lib Dems are likely to be picking up extra voters because a lot of voters are pissed off with the two major parties and Reform are disgusting.

I used to be an active LD and had a lot of time for Tim Farron, thought he was very unfairly treated. I understand why he was being careful in that interview, but what he came up with in the end seemed sensible. However I think he was optimistic about the outcome. LDs are have always been prone to ideologically driven rifts, and this one could finish them off, or at least seriously weaken them. It really is an issue of extreme political toxicity.

Any political party which successfully stands to be elected to parliament can vote to change existing legislation and make any previous ruling void from that point on.

I am the same