Gary Powell is a former councillor in Buckinghamshire.
There is a dynamic new cross-party grassroots movement in British politics.
The Daily Mail recently published a piece by Maya Forstater that announced the most significant female political movement since the Suffragettes. It will ask candidates in local and national elections to state whether they back women’s sex-based rights – or alternatively, the gender ideology that is determined to undermine them.
In her piece, Forstater – who lost her job simply for asserting on social media the insuperable biological difference between men and women – referred to the tortured obfuscations of senior politicians when asked to define what a woman is, or to answer the question as to whether a woman can have a penis.
She described their failure to provide accurate answers to such questions as “cowardly” and denounced the many MPs and councillors who lack “the courage to stick their heads above the parapet” stating:
“We women have had enough”.
Three of the U.K.’s biggest women’s rights groups – Women Uniting, Sex Matters, and the Women’s Rights Network (WRN) – have combined into an alliance that encourages supporters to ask candidates where they stand on this issue.
“We believe that politicians should know they can’t expect our cross in the voting box if they do not acknowledge and protect women’s sex-based rights… We want as many members of the general public – female and male, and across all party lines — to quiz their politicians, both national and local, about their stance on women’s rights.”
Women Uniting has also produced a simple but powerful campaign video in time for the May local elections.
The new alliance includes supporters from across a wide political spectrum. The seriousness of the attack on fundamental women’s rights and child safeguarding has brought about a unity that enables campaigners to put aside their political differences on other issues.
Many who used to vote for left-wing parties now find themselves politically homeless and unable to vote for parties that treat women with contempt and throw child safeguarding to the wolves. Although some will simply abstain or spoil their ballot papers, others have resolved to lend their votes to sound Conservative candidates. One Twitter user wrote “Family of five. Four of us will be eligible to vote in next GE. Three years ago we would have all voted Labour. Next election we are all voting Tory. Why? Because Labour have sold women, homosexuals and young people down the gender river. I will never trust them again.” And another: “I was until recently a Labour Party member. But when I politely spoke to my Labour MP, council and pamphleteers, they dismissed my concerns about paediatric transition and self-ID as transphobic and bad parenting. I never expected to vote Tory, but you guys don’t want my vote.”
Information about the harm caused by gender ideology is now getting through to the public, despite the efforts of the leftist media and Big Tech to keep people in the dark. Some conservative voters are already starting to declare that Conservative candidates who support gender ideology will not get their vote. The Conservative commentator, Chris Rose, wrote: “At minimum, my vote won’t go to any future candidate who thinks it’s okay for doctors to ask men if they’re pregnant or can’t define what 50% of the electorate are.”
The voting booth allows those who have been silenced to register their protest anonymously and effectively, without risk of reprisals.
The campaign’s snappy slogan is:
“Respect my SeX if you want my X”.
Local councils need to take seriously the harm they do to women and girls when they promote or appease gender ideology. Several local councils, including Cambridge City Council, have passed motions that include the false and Orwellian statement that “transwomen are women”. The impact of this on policy?
Forstater says:
“It’s easily forgotten how much is under local authority control: from single-sex services such as changing rooms in sports centres and toilet facilities in parks, to the guidance given to schools about sex education and how they respond to children who are gender-questioning. Our campaign, then, is very much a local issue.”
“Local services touch everybody’s lives – and it’s local authorities making decisions which lead to funding being taken away from women’s refuges and rape crisis centres, for example, if they don’t open up their services to biological males who identify as women.”
Via the campaign, candidates are being asked to “respect women’s right to single-sex spaces and services; protect the safeguarding of vulnerable children; and prioritise sex over gender in language, law, policy and regulation,” as well as to resist the pressure to be “trans-inclusive” in services at the expense of women’s need for “a secure, single-sex environment”.
Voters will certainly want to know which candidates support the undermining of women’s protected spaces and of parental rights to protect child safeguarding against identity politics indoctrination in schools and online.
Women’s right to protection from male violence, male voyeurism, and male physical advantage in sport, is a matter of great interest to the electorate, who might think twice about voting for those gender activists holding political office who remain deafeningly silent when zealots on their own side send gender-critical women rape and death threats, a large number of which have been collected and published on the website www.terfisaslur.com.
By taking a firm stand against the prioritisation of misogynistic gender ideology over women’s sex-based rights and child safeguarding, the Conservative Party will be acting true to common sense and conservative values, and taking principled measures that will translate into many votes. The general public does not believe that women can have penises or that men can have vaginas or be pregnant. And the electorate will lose trust in politicians who pretend to be incapable of understanding basic biology.
Thank goodness politicians in our Party have begun to demonstrate the courage of their convictions with regard to gender ideology. Nadhim Zahawi is one of the most recent. As a result of the campaign perhaps, every day now, there appear to be more.
This week, the Prime Minister has also weighed in to the debate with a new energy, confidence, and clarity, that augur well for the future, defending single-sex spaces and sport, and opposing children being allowed to make irreversible decisions with regard to transgender medical interventions. This followed his protection of child safeguarding and evidence-based psychotherapy by removing “gender identity” from the proposed conversion therapy bill, with the Prime Minister refusing to cave in to the consequent outrage of the LGBT+ gender lobby.
Grassroots Conservative members and voters like this kind of leadership, and it will attract even more new voters.
The modern Suffragette movement will be working with great determination to ensure that candidates who betray women and children will learn hard lessons at the ballot box. Conservative candidates, please take note. Find your courage, grasp this opportunity, and nail your colours to the right mast. Women and children are counting on you.