I wonder what the WI are going to announce on Woman's Hour in the next few minutes?

[nauticant]

Apparently it will be a matter of the greatest seriousness and sorrow.

It’s one of those things where we’ll never know for sure, but if she does know she’s never treated me differently for it.

“You could go with her, and see how long it takes for some of the others to stop attending.”
I did go with her and these has been no change in the number of people attending

That's a flawed comparison.

I'm a British citizen with a British passport. It so happens that I'm half-Slav/half-Scottish. The fact that I'm officially British doesn't eradicate my Slav or Scottish heritage - which is a bit more than a feeling. Of course, the state could interfere and there would be little that I could do about it.

When I married, I changed my hybrid name from something like Fiona Pavlović to Fiona MacDonald. I'm the same person that I was.

I'm a woman. If I were to decide to identify as a man, even if I were to have an operation it wouldn't transform me from being a woman into a half-man - no matter what the state said.

What is extremist was the TRA tactic of protesting against any woman’s group or service that wasn’t trans inclusive. It wasn’t good enough for them to have some women’s groups/service that included TW. They wanted ALL women’s stuff to include men.

Your proposal wouldn’t work. Because firstly, it would constitute sex discrimination against men who don’t have a trans identity and secondly TRAs would still want EVERY woman’s group to include TW.

Smooth slide from your previous post about the theoretical 'Chinese Club'. My point was that identity based clubs don't do self-id.

Well it isn't their safe space and never was. When I was a member, I gave a trans member a lift regularly and only after I stopped going, I found out that women were not terribly eager to get to know me better because they thought I very friendly with the trans member. I was politely friendly but it showed just how unwelcome they were although it couldn't be said. There were some very awkward evenings where it was just so obvious that there was a male trying to take part in a very female gathering.

You can only see this from a trans perspective i.e. what works best for you and you haven't asked youself why these women attend a women only group.

Consent is essential to women- and for you to attend without getting the consent from the group is at a minimum disrespectful but is a demonstration of what women constantly refer to as male entitlement. It is this very assumption that it is the male that is able to assess the risk to the group not the females that have got us into this vitriolic debate in the first place.

I would ask the groups organiser if they can ask the question whether any women are uncomfortable with a trans woman attending, knowing full well that if you attend it means that they cannot prevent other men from attending.

They may not have had a problem, and a lot of people won't.

It doesn't change one fact though. The second you went it changed from a women's book group to a mixed sex book group.

They want extra special concessions just for TW. They wouldn’t actually want associations to be able to exclude particular groups, ie a community choir that was for Hindus and Christian’s only but excluded Sikhs. They just want the exception to be made for TW.

oh and Transmen with a GRC would absolutely have lost their maternity protections if the Scottish Government had had their way.

• Under the Scottish Government's proposed interpretation (which the Supreme Court rejected): A trans man with a GRC would legally be a man for all purposes, and thus would not be covered by the provisions in the Equality Act that specifically refer to the protected characteristic of "pregnancy and maternity", which apply only to women (biological females).

Talking of being Scottish, only people who live in Scotland were allowed to vote in the referendum, (and you certainly can't change your nationality at will).

With the other PCs:

The church can ask applicants to church schools to demonstrate evidence of church attendance.

Women need a MATB1 to be entitled to maternity benefits.

There are set criteria for getting a blue badge

You can't lie about your age to buy a drink.

Married people need to prove their relationship with a wedding certificate

Asylum seekers can be turned away if they claim to be gay but the authorities don't believe them.

A tribunal recently decided that a non-binary person didn't have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment

Equality law really isn't a free for all where anyone can claim to have any protected characteristic.

Yes. That would be the best thing. Why as a man would you join a group for women when you know you don’t belong?

I don’t go into it with bad intentions, my friend invited me so she obviously thought it’d be ok, and I wasn’t going to force it if my presence was a problem. But it wasn’t and I’ve found community with a group of likeminded people.

If you just turned up and talked about books it wasn't an association so wouldn't be covered by the Equality Act.

Great. And now you go to a mixed sex book club. Good job. Well done. No more women’s book club for them.

You’re welcome to your beliefs, but I’m pretty sure the people that attend don’t see it way

I don't see how you can possibly know.

I didn't say you did, but now you know about what the other perspective is there is a way forward to be respectful.

There is room for both groups, you can have a womens and transwomens book group and then everyone knows what they are signing up for and noone has to have suspicions.

Given the threats of violence and women losing their jobs and friends for expressing discomfort about transwomen in women's spaces, how confident are you that any woman deeply uncomfortable and unhappy with your attendance at what was once a women's book club would dare to say anything?

Because I would not be confident at all. Certainly not confident enough to be crowing about it online as proof that it's fine for men to insert themselves into women's groups.

If this story is true, I think your decision was incredibly selfish and disrespectful, and it is a shame that you lack the insight to recognise this doesn't prove what you are holding it out to prove.

Because it’s futile? or because you can’t explain what women have in common with all trans women that they don’t have in common with any man

As previously discussed, if they believe both you and they have a female gender and they exclude and include women and men equally, regardless of sex then I just think different strokes for different folks.

The problem is the conflation of sex with gender because sex needs to have a specific meaning in law, and gender is an unclearly defined concept based in belief.

Honestly, that was one of my thoughts, too. I think the original question was intended to be rhetorical - correct answer: it would be wrong to be forced to out myself. But so many such groups are hosted in women's own homes. If I were hosting a stated women's book club, and a male attended, I could feel unsafe and would certainly feel misled. That the poster asking this felt the answer was self-explanatory suggests this hadn't occurred to them. In other words, transwomen and women are different. We each need the right to our own words and spaces!

What P is arguing to me seems to be, despite tens of pages so far, pretty simple. To permit "women" to have a word of their own that excludes males who self-identify as women is authoritarian overreach by a (necessarily sinister-sounding, with a capital "S") State that contravenes the norms of democratic society. Yes, transwomen and women can mix in a multitude of contexts. Yes, they can enjoy each others' company. But transwomen must be able to call themselves women. MUST.

When you get down to the bare bones of it, it's laughably absurd and deeply ironic. Fundamentally (another reoccurring word-family that's apt here on several levels), P wants to deny 51% of the population any word of their own. At all. And that 51% would be the half who only just got the vote less than 100 years ago, note (which seems relevant, given that democratic values are central to their convictions). And as such, by logical extension, P argues that a democratic society now should in fact deny this group the ability to distinguish and name themselves, and thereby to advocate for their needs and rights.

Meanwhile, other posters are repeatedly pointing out the infinity of ways in which transwomen and women may still enjoy each other's company, with the only limiting factor being that this isn't under the descriptor "Woman", as that word's long since been taken and remains urgently needed. They're patiently explaining the law, the ethics, the philosophy and the biology of this. Again, and again, and again. Only to face the same old rhetoric, with little nuance and no meaningful acknowledgement of their points.

I sure know which of the two viewpoints being presented in this thread sounds inflexible, sinister and even somewhat authoritarian to me...

It doesn't matter if they see it that way or not.

The truth is any womens single sex anything that you enter immediately becomes mixed sex the second your foot goes over that threshold.

And to add this is why I am confused about the decision for the WI.

TW have been permitted as a matter of policy since the 1970s and therefore all members knew what they are signing up for. So I don't understand why they have decided to make it single sex again when they had a system that was working well.

Ok, but the question is, who in the organisation gets to decide whether they want to open it up to transwomen as well as biological women?

At the moment, it seems the WI upper committee decided this from above, on behalf of all members without daring to ask what the members thought which is profoundly anti-democratic.

If they want to alter their constitution, they can do it properly and ask their members if they no longer want to be women only (using the legal definition of woman).

But they should do it openly and up front rather than on the sly and removing something precious that many women value ie single sex spaces, and space to be apart from men.

You might be surprised.

Oh they do. They just do the womanly thing and #bekind. I mean when males do the manly thing of butting into women’s spaces the options are put up or shut up. Maybe they like your friend and don’t want to upset her by pointing out it’s no longer a women’s book club because she made it mixed sex.