‘Your Party’ have chosen the delegates for their first conference ‘by sortition’. They said this would ensure that a genuinely representative cross section of their supporters would be present. I suppose as we’re aiming for a ‘bottom up’ democracy, the fact that this has ruled out some of the natural leaders who’ve been working for so long to build party membership and activity in the regions isn’t a disaster…

But

There is no funding for conference goers beyond a belated offer of help with travel, so it’s limited to those who have the time and the funds to get themselves to the city, pay for accommodation, etc etc. This disadvantages the poor, working people and, disproportionately, women.

And that’s only the start of the problems for women

Vast numbers of women have not signed up because Zara Sultana has made it crystal clear that those who believe sex-based rights matter are not welcome. She says ‘the right to identify’ must be ‘a given’, and those with ‘socially conservative views’ are not welcome, and she thinks standing up for women’s legal rights is socially conservative.

But there’s more

What happens when you combine ‘sortition’ with self-ID? Amongst other things, their allegedly random ‘sortition’ process includes ensuring ‘the right’ proportion of minorities and among those minorities, LGBTQ+ Not LGB or LGBT, but the entire alphabet on the other side of the ‘T’ which, as far as any of us can make out, is a set of categories anyone can compile any way they like.

This is Identity Politics

What we do know however, is that the people who announce themselves to be in those categories on the other side of the ‘T’ include large numbers of those trendy, Pride-going people whose only distinction is that they’ve chosen some identity labels they fancy. That includes males who are conventional in every way except that they sometimes call themselves women and among them there are males who like to call themselves lesbian.

Well that might be fine socially, but in this context, it means there is no way Your Party knows how many females they’ve invited. As far as they can see, there might be very few. It’s quite possible there are no actual lesbians (that is, same-sex-oriented females) at all.

Lesbians are filtered out at every stage of that process. And Your Party won’t even see themselves doing that, because most of them still haven’t grasped the ‘clash of rights’ issue that self-ID, the lead policy of identity politics, creates. And lesbians are the people most disadvantaged by running politics and services on the basis of self-ID instead of material fact.

In short, we must question any decisions conference may make on sex or on what they call ‘trans rights’ because they have, to an unknown extent, excluded that minority it most deeply concerns.

What does legally recognised sex self-ID do?

It invites convicted criminals to suddenly realise they’re women and opt for women’s jails. It invites mediocre male sportsmen to give themselves another bite at the cherry by gate-crashing women’s sport. It invites curious males to give themselves access to lesbian clubs. It knocks safeguarding in schools, hostels and refuges out of action because you cannot question a self-identified ‘woman’. It baffles and endangers migrant women in detention.

None of this is the fault of trans people. No-one on the left is claiming trans people are the problem. Self-ID is the problem. Identity Politics is the problem. And Your Party have set themselves up to be steamrollered into Id-Pol by combining sortition with self-ID.

Why is this a disaster?

Well you may agree with me that risking the erasure of minoritised women is a problem in itself but, as many people seem to be okay with that, let them think about this: the general public now knows about the issues above.

They saw what happened at the Olympics, they saw politicians helplessly nodding through people like ‘Isla’ Bryson. Vast numbers joined in the cheering when Martine Croxall rolled her eyes and inserted the word ‘women’ back where it belongs in a news report.

Are you going to conference?

In short, we all need a new left party that’s electable, and the public has had enough of identity politics. If you’re going to that conference, please don’t let it go down that road. How do you stop it? Here’s how: when someone says they’re supporting ‘trans rights’, ask them what rights. If they want to ensure the care and protection of trans people, or protect them from discrimination, fine, say yes, we all want that but if they’re after ‘the right to identify’, or putting some hazy idea of ‘gender identity’ into the law instead of sex, make sure they know that’s a sure way to lose the next election. They need to think again.

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