Postponed
My local Labour party voted through a motion for the online women’s conference which took place at the end of June. The motion (that I drafted) asked Labour to re-endorse its manifesto commitment to sex-based rights. It also called on Party leaders to condemn the abuse received by women. It stated that the misogyny that women face for speaking out “would not be tolerated were it directed at a person/people with any other protected characteristic.”
Predictably, our perfectly reasonable motion was rejected by the conference arrangements committee because they claimed “it diminish(es) the experiences” of these other groups of people.
Meaning…what? That it diminishes those experiences because in fact women’s experiences of abuse really are more trivial than anyone else’s? That’s what they went with?
I appealed against the decision and forwarded this to Marsha deCordova, Labour’s Shadow Women and Equalities Minister and Charlotte Gerada, the National Women’s Officer amongst others.
Aaand none of them replied. Soz, women too last century.
Labour’s approach to concerns about the threat to single sex spaces and services is to stick their fingers very firmly in their ears. Clearly proving that they aren’t bothered about the treatment of women when we campaign to defend our rights. Can you imagine that a complaint like this would be ignored if it were about racism or disability or, God forbid, “gender reassignment”?
Women had their chance. There was a little window in the late 20th century, and that window has now closed. Take it up with Complaints, which has an office in Ulan Bator, open one day a year. Next!
The women’s conference was the predictable farce that many of us knew it would be. The chair kept telling delegates that we must include men who say they’re women in anything and everything we do. I managed to speak about the spurious reason for rejecting my motion and the urgent need for sex-based rights to be discussed. I was constantly interrupted and eventually cut off. I was the only speaker at the conference to be shut down in this way.
Apart from my brief contribution there was no mention of the huge elephant in the room.
In fact there was no debate on anything. It was more like a motivational event where we all had to applaud everything that toed the official party line, part of which seemed to be, men can take part in the women’s conference if they simply self-identify into womanhood. One such man was granted the privilege of speaking during a “discussion” on Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) despite the fact that I know of at least one woman who was prevented from speaking even though her local party had submitted a motion on this issue.
Complaints office. Ulan Bator. Sunday May 47 next year. Goodbye.
