Good riddance to the Women's Equality Party!
This elite outfit was more interested in defending men-in-dresses than women's rights
After a decade on life support, the Women’s Equality Party is about to be put out of its misery. An elitist, out-of-touch project from the get go, it will not be missed. The party established ‘to see women enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men’ failed at the very first hurdle. Its achingly erudite leaders - the BBC’s Sandi Toksvig and author Catherine Mayer - struggled to define ‘woman’.
Yes, you read that correctly. The founders of a party for women, whose whole schtick was to be more intelligent and cosmopolitan than the populist plebs, could not say what it was that made someone a woman. The car crash was inevitable. The more the words female, sex, sexual equality and biological reality became too difficult to utter, the less the party was able to pinpoint exactly which rights women needed defending.
So determined were Toksvig and Mayer to differentiate themselves from the bawdy masses they failed to register that us women get angry about men in women’s prisons and changing rooms. We get angry about men beating women at sports (sometimes all too literally). But very, very few of us get worked up about the plight of men in dresses. Yet that’s just what the Women’s Equality Party ended up doing. WEP - or WE as they insisted upon calling themselves became a front organisation championing the rights of blokes in frocks.
It was all horribly predictable. In its founding statement, WEP said its goal was: ‘to support the right of all to define their sex or gender or to reject gendered divisions as they choose.’ Now, feminism does indeed have a long and proud history of challenging gender stereotypes. Feminists fought for women to have an education, have careers, vote in elections and earn the same as men for the same work - all important campaigns and all of which required challenging assumptions about the capabilities of ‘the fairer sex’. Supporting the right of women to define what type of woman they want to be is important. Supporting the right of people to define sex itself is just ludicrous. Being a woman is about more than being a biological entity but the biological reality is not insignificant. It can be no more wished away or re-defined than we can wish away gravity or re-define water as ‘dry’.
The first member of the WEP to fall foul of this nonsense was Heather Brunskell-Evans. In 2017, Brunskell-Evans appeared on Radio 4’s Moral Maze and ‘expressed the view that gender is a social construct while sex is a biological reality which families and society invest with meaning.’ She continued by arguing that ‘caution should be exercised when it comes to the medical transgendering of children’. Forget the fact that to the overwhelming majority of the population these statements are entirely uncontroversial. Ignore the fact that to an earlier generation of feminists, saying ‘sex is a biological reality’ was to state the bleeding obvious. Brunskell-Evans had upset WEP’s male members.
Incredibly, rather than defending Brunskell-Evans, not just a senior party spokesperson but - crucially - a real, actual, woman - Toksvig and Mayer backed the men. A party statement declared: ‘WE recognise that the binary words “woman” and “man” do not reflect the gender experience of everyone in our country’. And with that, the party for women became the party for men with a sexual fetish, men who ‘identify’ as women while prancing around in lipstick in high heels (reinforcing gender stereotypes much?). To confirm this was the party’s intent, its statement continued: ‘Cis inclusivity must never mean trans exclusivity, nor vice versa.’ Which translates into everyday English as ‘sod women’.
Behind the scenes, wrangling continued as party leader Sophie Walker, in public at least, consolidated WEP into a posh girls’ club. Arguments for ‘gender quotas’ for women in parliament and equal pay for BBC presenters confirmed that ‘intersectional feminism’ meant sticking up for the male and the wealthy. Walker quit in 2019, claiming ‘sometimes in order to lead, you have to get out of the way’ and she wanted to see ‘new activists and new ideas’. Two years later, in 2019, another explanation emerged.
Walker was replaced by Mandu Reid. Reid tried to get a grip on the trans debate within the party by both pretending that the division between those who supported women’s sex-based rights and those who did not, did not exist, and, at the very same time, coming down firmly on one side of the debate. The WEP, Reid said, ‘reaffirms its commitment to being an inclusive movement and to fighting for the liberation of all women, including trans women. WE supports the right of transgender people to self determine their gender.’ To her credit, Walker, publicly challenged Reid’s position. ‘The leadership and management groups in the party do not make it a comfortable home for women who do not accept the ideology of gender,’ she said (noting the grim irony of having herself overseen the departure of women from the party for this very reason). Walker was critical of Reid for putting forward a motion that would pass ‘a policy of self-ID without a full membership vote’. Of course, with the WEP by-now stuffed full of out-of-touch women and men, Reid’s self-id motion passed. In the aftermath, at least 80 women left the party. The party’s - ever authoritarian - responded by curtailing debate. According to one account, the WEP went so far as to block even the word ‘sex’ from social media discussions.
And now, thank God, it’s over. Or almost over. At a special conference to be held next month, Toksvig and Mayer will propose the party shuts up shop. In their parting statement (published in The Guardian, of course) Toksvig and Mayer acknowledge: ‘sceptics labelled WEP a party for privileged women, and there was some truth to that.’ But they remain proud of having brought ‘together the experiences and ideas of people of all genders from across the country.’
Let’s hope that this is not just the end of the Women’s Equality Party but the end of the entire brand of trans-inclusive intersectional feminism. The WEP represents an elite form of politics, where academics, authors and BBC ‘talent’ promote their own interests - and the rights of men - off the backs of the majority of women who, lacking agents and the funds for private members clubs, really do need single-sex spaces and sex-based rights.