WEP Closure
In a recent Guardian article, the co-founders and leaders of the Women’s Equality Party – Sandy Toksvig, Catherine Mayer, and Mandy Reid – discuss the reasons for the party’s closure. They claim the changed political climate is responsible. A more forensic analysis locates the causes in one of its founding principles, namely that men can be women. When WEP was launched to great fanfare in 2015, under the leadership of Sophie Walker, the co-founders had thus already sown the seeds of the party’s eventual demise.
Contrary to their hubristic claims, in the decade of the party’s existence, WEP has achieved little of real importance in alleviating the injustices faced by women and children. It is not, as they claim, that WEP’s model “no longer works.” It never worked in the first place.
The party endorsed the legal fiction that it is possible to change sex and fully backed proposed changes to the law to make it as easy as applying for a passport. As the democratically elected spokeswoman for the party on violence against women and girls, I was silenced by Walker in meetings from speaking out about the devastating impact on the lives of women and children if self-identification became implemented.
When I talked in the media about my pioneering work with Professor Michele Moore, in which we argued that no child is “born in the wrong body,” and raised the alarm for the first time about the Tavistock GIDS, WPATH, Mermaids, and Gendered Intelligence, a male party member expressed narcissistic outrage at the implication that he isn’t innately female. He called for me to be dismissed because of alleged “transphobia” and “hate.” Walker prioritized his demands, and the governing body took authoritarian measures to silence me because, they argued, my views on children “brought the party into disrepute.”
The Guardian states almost in passing that at one point in WEP’s history there had been an internal “toxic debate” over “transgender rights”, thus regurgitating the exhausted and discredited claim that anyone sticking up for women and children is acting unreasonably and in bad faith. In reality, we were being spectacularly “gas-lit” by the only political party claiming to truly represent our interests.
Women and our good sense, courage, and grassroots activism have forced the WEP into irrelevance. We began to break away or deem the party an encumbrance as we fought for women and children and our rights to bodily integrity. These rights were being eroded by the law, hospitals, prisons, schools, medicine, and so on, an institutional capture by the very identitarian ideology that WEP not only fostered but furiously defended.
Like all politicians who participated in the fiasco that humans with penises can be women, the leaders and the co-founders of WEP now attempt to disavow that they played any part in the collective cultural madness that has gripped the UK. But the women who were once WEP members remember. The sad indictment of WEP is that it will not be mourned, and its place in history, if it has any, will be its irrelevance on the political landscape that let women and children down.