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October 28, 2024 - 10:00am
Members of the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) have been left sobbing after the leadership supported a motion to close the party. In an article in the Observer, WEP’s founders Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig, announced that after a decade of dilettante feminism they were reluctantly taking the decision because of a “changed political landscape”.
“The Tories’ attempts to contain the electoral threat from the hard Right has instead seen them fully captured by it,” opined the pair, adding of the Labour Party: “The leadership barely listens to its MPs and wider membership, so it is hardly likely to pay heed to us.”
But why should politicians listen to the views of women who have virtue-signalled themselves into oblivion? Ultimately, the party failed the Ronseal test when it was unable to define the word “woman”, let alone advocate for people who were, until recently, widely understood to be adult human females. After her election as leader of the WEP in 2019, Mandu Reid told Pink News that “transwomen are women […] but they’re women among a rich tapestry of what it means to be a woman, of which we all are a part.”
In an instant Reid reduced the reality of womanhood to metaphorical soft furnishing. This put WEP on the side of those advocating for men’s right to identify into women-only prisons, changing rooms and hospital wards.
Sophie Walker, who led WEP from 2015 to 2019, warned Reid not to support a policy of gender self-identification, writing in an open letter: “I don’t know how you write policies for women, if anyone can be a woman.” Yet Walker herself is not without blame; it was under her leadership that the first scalp was taken, when academic Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans was pushed out of her role within the party for publicly questioning the idea that children should be affirmed in cross-sex identities.
Arguably, it was Walker’s parting shot marked the real end of the party. When announcing her resignation, she claimed to be “frustrated by the limits of my own work to ensure that women of colour, working class women and disabled women see themselves reflected in this party and know they can lead this movement”. Unsurprisingly, this sowed division. It suggested that simply being born a woman was not good enough, and that the party ought to focus on identity politics rather than feminism.
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SubscribeThis party is probably the funniest thing Sandi Toksvig has ever done.
The naive fantasies of narcissistic bourgeois liberals.
The ‘Wonderland’ people. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean …’.
#leftyleadershipsowhite
Not that I care, but you gotta love the hypocrisy.
The only part I disagree with is, “identity politics rather than feminism” when feminism seems to be the original of, and template for, identity politics. Of course, it drowned in identity politics.
The problem for the WEP is that it was formed after the last Is were dotted and the last Ts were crossed in the legal recognition of sexual equality; there was never anything for the party to do. And that seems to have been the point. It’s ironic that they criticise the Tories, the only party to have produced a female PM, even the Tartan Tories had a female leader by 2015 when the WEP was set up.
Bang on, and saved me commenting. And the objection seems to be against focussing on women who are members of genuinely disadvantaged groups (such as working class women).
I rather enjoyed the discussion a couple of years ago on (IIRC) a daytime TV programme hosted by Matthew Wright where a sour-faced Sophie Walker was calmly and expertly shut down by Jordan Peterson. The WEP always seemed to me to be an ill-thought-out vanity project that took a woefully superficial approach to women’s rights. Even their name was confusingly vague – equality with, or equality between?
They only ever seemed to be advocating for the interests of those who were in their own little middle-class demographic. Don’t suppose many women will miss them.
Thanks for mentioning that debate – it’s on Youtube and is worth a watch!
Good riddance to the handmaidens
“Failed the Ronseal test” ! Priceless. One to store away and reuse.
“Ultimately, the party failed the Ronseal test when it was unable to define the word “woman””
It’s like something out of Monty Python.
I’m not sure what the WEP was when it started out, but it soon enough became little more than a platform for the vacuous virtue-signalling of the type of progressive who prioritises causes in order of how fashionable they are at the right dinner parties.
Nothing much surprises me any more, but it remains a source of considerably incredulity that so-called feminists like Mandu Reid cannot yet see the sheer lunacy of throwing open the category “women” to anyone who fancies it – which of course means men and often exactly the same men who make the existence of separate spaces for women and girls necessary.
Hundreds of sporting achievements taken from women and girls, violent men in women’s prisons, men running women’s refuges gaslighting victims of sexual assault. Has none of this yet penetrated her armour of smugness about how “kind” she’s being?
Women’s rights, women’s services, women’s facilities etc exist in order to create spaces for women’s safety, dignity and fairness. If you then insist that men can be women and have unfettered access, then you are either saying that women don’t need them or that women don’t deserve them.
There’s nothing right about the Tory Party in any sense of the word.
Nobody is going to miss these clowns.
The Women’s Equality Party should obviously have been run by men.
No, seriously. Men who care about women would not contemplate for a moment allowing other men into women’s spaces because we know what men are capable of.
No. Because that job would absolutely attract the wrong type of man, that is those who seek to abuse but disguise themselves in so doing.
It’s exactly where we are already with the gender woo nonsense.
Google ‘irony’.
My local WEP candidate in council elections was a large man in his sixties, who sported a big, bushy beard which he dyed in many different colours. Clad in his trademark purple velvet suit and sandals, every night he trundles up to the Spoon on his mobility scooter to get filled up. I’m genuinely sorry if this is the end of his political career as he is highly entertaining.