We have included this article to explain our changing language, and to bring attention to the elephant in the room.
We are group of activist WI members, from a mixture of backgrounds, however, this does not mean we haven’t researched and double checked our resources, and made sure they are reliable. It does mean sometimes we’re not quite as correct in our terms as we want to be.
In the first letter sent to the NFWI the term ‘trans woman’ was used. There is/was an online debate whether to use transwoman or trans woman and at the time the ‘kinder’ stance was use ‘trans woman’. The member who wrote it did not want to be dismissed out of hand, so it was thought this small concession worth paying.
Subsequent submissions to the NFWI do not use this term. Initially because it uses the word ‘woman’ and other members did not like this, it can be confusing to people (what does it mean?), it makes women a subset of their own biological sex classification, and, as Julie Bindel, puts it “the word woman is already taken”.
More recently we have been made aware of the Legal Feminist website and blog, and these posts:
Does the Law say That Trans Women are Women? which is the companion piece to A Blog About Boxes
After reading this we realised a few things:
- Any vote will not be to include ‘trans women’ because they simply do not exist.
- Any vote will be to make the Women’s Institute mixed sex, otherwise, and what is now happening, it is discriminatory against men without the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.
- We’ve been labouring under slightly false pretences, due to the above points you either admit ALL men or none. We prefer the none option.
We believe the real reason the NFWI do not want a vote is because they know this. Which is why they have removed the single sex exemptions references that the Equality Act 2010 contains from the EDI policy.
Women's Institute Declaration 