Category Archives: Op-eds

We’ve talked a lot about the changes the party has made to diversity quotas for the forthcoming presidential election this week. Presidential candidates Prue and Josh have had their say, as have Rebecca, Iain and Jack.

I have wanted to amplify other voices, but so many people have asked me for my view that I thought I’d give it to you too.

My heart is in a million pieces this weekend. To be fair, it’s been that way since the Supreme Court Judgement effectively ruined the lives of too many people I love for me to be silent on this issue. Ever.

Over the past four and a bit decades, I have seen on so many occasions the absolute joy that comes with being accepted as the person you are. When someone is recognised as the man or woman or person they have long known themselves to be, it is a real privilege to watch them become themselves rather than hide their true identity. To see them set free to live their best life as their true self, to live peaceably doing their own thing and not getting in anyone’s way.

That’s been the direction of travel for most of my adult life and I was proud that we lived in a country which was one of the best places in the world for trans people.

And then a fringe group, fuelled by £70,000 from a billionaire, were successful in winning their case at the Supreme Court in April, obtaining a judgement that in a very narrow set of circumstances, woman and man in the Equality Act had to be interpreted as this weird and according to doctors at the BMA “scientifically illiterate” definition of biological woman or man.

This judgement makes not one woman safer. In fact the amount of time we have spent talking about these issues over the past few years actively harmed woman’s safety, wellbeing, legal status and wellbeing because it has distracted from the real problems women face in every aspect of their daily lives. The judgement, does, however, make the lives of trans people extremely difficult. And not just trans people. Any woman who doesn’t satisfy narrow criteria on what a woman should look like is now likely to be challenged when doing something as basic as going to the toilet. It’s truly disgusting and demeaning and as liberals we should not stand for it.

What has rendered my heart into its broken state has been seeing the impact on those same people that I love. They are no less who they are, but they feel the weight of prejudice, they fear even the most mundane aspects of daily life. Nobody should be in that situation.

With a few notable exceptions, though, we’ve been silent. We’ve not stood up as we should have done for a marginalised group under fire. We’ve not told the human stories of those affected. We’ve not talked about how this is a dangerous distraction from the real issues facing women.

This, despite our Conference voting in massive numbers just 7 months ago, in favour of a policy paper that is fully in support of the right of trans people and all LGBT+ people to be who they are. Just six weeks ago, our Conference overwhelmingly for the second time against a constitutional amendment which would have required our trans and non binary colleagues to be counted as the sex they were assigned at birth.

I want to give you a bit of background on the quotas. I have spent most of my adult life banging my head against a brick wall trying to get this party to a place where it took women’s representation seriously. But then finally, about 10 years ago, in a windowless room in the party’s former HQ in Great George Street, we got a decent way forward, after much wrangling. I found myself in a room with constitutional wonks like Mark Pack, Jeremy Hargreaves and Jon Ball and we came up with a workable framework for ensuring better and more balanced representation for a number of under-represented groups. The gender quota has also been used on occasion to increase the number of men on a committee when more than 60% of women have been elected. I don’t love that so much because, to be honest, women have been under-represented for so long that we could literally have every place on every committee for the next 2000 years and still not redress the historical imbalance but that’s by the by. But we got these quotas in and I think that they have made a difference even when they have not needed to be used. Our federal committees are more diverse and that is a good thing.

I want these quotas to stay and be used for as long as it takes for there to be a world free of discrimination. But how would I feel about benefitting from their use when my trans and non binary siblings cannot without the indignity of being counted as who they are not.

And now this week, on the eve of ballots being issued, the party issued a statement instituting pretty much what Conference rejected. Did I say it was just 6 weeks ago?

The establishment line, from talking to many people about this in recent days, seems to be:

a) we have advice and we can’t do anything else or the anti-trans groups or individuals will sue us

b) we can’t do as the Scottish Greens have done (with great reluctance) and suspend our gender quota until the legal landscape is clearer for a justification that makes no sense to me.

My feelings on the points above:

a) Try harder. There is more than one legal view on this and we are very likely to get sued from the other perspective to. Our approach seems to be inconsistent with several other laws, including the Human Rights Act and GDPR as far as I can see. Of course I don’t want to see one penny of our members’ money going to anti-trans litigants but I feel like we could be doing a lot more to build a successful challenge.

b) But Conference emphatically rejected the changes announced last week so surely there is no authority to impose them. And any pushback on how the Scottish Greens can do this and we can’t just gets meaningless word salad in return.

c) The communications around this would make an omnishambles look competent and have been woefully inadequate. The initial announcement was slipped out on our internal elections website without candidates being alerted. Not only that, but we should have had a clear statement that this was horrific and that we wanted to see clear changes in the law to ensure that everyone’s rights were respected.

While I am sure that the email sent to candidates late on Friday was well-meaning, it spectacularly failed to show any understanding of how people are actually feeling. It was described to me by one frustrated person thus:

As you’ll notice, we’ve been forced to stand on your fingers as you dangle from the edge of a cliff. We hope you’re not affected by this, but if you are, here’s a helpline where you can access our leaflet, “Dealing with Gravity”. We hope this will be comforting as you plummet hundreds of feet. Have a great weekend!

d) Acquiescing to this is not an isolated incident. We have been consistently throwing the people our preamble requires us to speak for under the bus in this ill-thought through exclusive pursuit of soft Tory voters.

Which is doubly stupid as soft Tory voters are likely to be socially liberal and horrified at what is happening on many levels.