Last week has been hard and the subject of a lot of soul searching.

I’m a Lib Dem for a lot of reasons. I believe in the values of liberalism and appreciate how the party approaches the nuance of those values in balancing individual and community or societal freedoms. I think a political movement that represents this and campaigns for a liberal vision of society that balances these freedoms to empower people, through decentralising of power and moving decision making closer to those it affects is an important thing for our society and is a way out of polarised extremism.

The thoughtfulness of the party’s policy making process to produce impactful, workable policies, and the effectiveness at which we campaign to win power to implement them is a unique place we occupy.

And I care about many of these policies. But being a trans woman I don’t get the option of whether or not trans politics/liberation is one of the policies I focus on, it has to be. As not only is it one that impacts me personally, as an elected trans representative, it is one I am looked at for, and expected to care about regardless.

So on top of fighting for affordable housing, cleaning up the streets in my area and advocating for residents left behind by a complacent Labour council, I’m having to fight against marginalisation. And it’s taking up more and more of my time and mental energy under the huge onslaught we are under: an onslaught of erosion of legal rights and protections, and a steady cultural shift which is seeing an erosion in trans acceptance and cruelty, bigotry and hate becoming acceptable.

And it’s not just legal rights. Transphobia is pervasive in the media, and proponents of it are benefiting from abusing the legal system to secure protections for their transphobic beliefs and bully and shut down those who challenge transphobia. Those in this powerful transphobic movement are leveraging their positions of privilege and power solely to segregate us, and leading around this cultural change that leaves us isolated from full societal participation.

I believe my party is trans positive, fundamentally.

I know it believes in self-determination and that it’s not the role of the state to define who I am. It understands nuance, and the interplay of individual and society that recognises that when I say I am a woman, that is not just a reflection of my internal sense of self, but also a reflection of how I am seen by society. It is a party that boggles at a Supreme Court ruling that undermines that, and knows that a legal judgement can not change how I know myself, or indeed the fact that society sees and treats me as a woman.

So I believe that this party is the political force best placed to fight back against transphobia and stop the erosion of our rights, because there is no other party of our size and scale that can do it. For all the affirmations Polanski and the Greens give to the trans community, they do not have the political power or influence to affect that change in the way that we can. It’s down to us.

And I know the body of the party comes out time and time again to confirm that it understands this, and I believe even the vast majority of our party’s representatives do. But when challenged on these beliefs, I am frequently let down by how often too many representatives (especially senior ones) equivocate, leaving room for doubt that is taken as abandonment by the trans community, and twisted into support for bigotry by those who wish to further isolate us.

And for the very few people who claim to be Lib Dems and share these values, but reject the idea that someone can define themselves, that it must be the state who does so, or that when the legal system’s ruling results in a definition of myself that is in conflict with my internal view and the societal view, I should succumb to the state’s view, I ask how on earth can you square that. I can not understand how anyone can see as liberal this view that, from my perspective, seems twisted and cruel, and enforced through the cruelty of bullying members through social media, and bullying the party structures into compliance with their worldview through legal threats.

But every time the visible representatives of the party let us down, or seem to be falling for the wolf in sheep’s clothing messaging that paints trans rights and women’s rights as in tension with each other (whereas usually eroding trans rights erodes the rights and protections of women as well – look at the impact of bathroom bans in US states which usually have resulted in increases in violence against women who are not traditionally feminine presenting), it hurts. And when the mechanics of the party fail to live up to those values, and when we are rightly criticised, I find it harder to be one of those elected representatives that wants to stand up proudly with a (now brighter) rosette when I know that others wearing that rosette are failing me.

So yes, I am hurt right now by the quota decision. I’m not even a candidate in these Federal Elections. And I fear that the situation that’s been created now isn’t possible to back away from, and the party machinery has backed itself into a corner created by the external legal situation and the aftermath of the Supreme Court but also its own poor decision making. Even if the decision around trans-exclusionary quotas is somehow reverted (and I fear that the corner the party is backed into by the poor decision making means it now won’t be able to take that step), that the decision was first made at all has hurt and eroded trust.

I understand that the party has to follow the law, even when the law is cruel and we want to change it, but every day where transphobia continues to gain more momentum, and the party chooses to expend its energy on things other than resisting that tide, it makes it harder for me to get up and fight for the community I was elected to serve, to push back against Reform and to campaign to get more good Lib Dems elected.

And I know there are more like me in the party who are the same and we have been soul searching together. But every person I lose in this fight because they feel the actions of the party no longer aligns with its values, so they can no longer be part of it, is understandable but makes it harder to fight this fight, and they deserve better.

The people responsible for the mechanics of the party that have led us here need to do some hard reflection, to try to be better to avoid this situation in future, so that myself and others I know and care about no longer have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off through no fault of our own, once again, and be left weaker for doing so.

* Chris Northwood (she/her) is a councillor in Manchester, deputy group leader of the Manchester Liberal Democrats and outgoing member of Federal Council.