This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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One of the signs you’re getting older is that when you learn of the death of an actor or singer you’d heard nothing about for ages, your immediate reaction is surprise that they were not already dead. Thus it was in late October when the Women’s Equality Party tweeted the “important news” that its leaders were recommending that its members vote to shut it down. This despite the party having offered “transformative solutions making a real difference”. (I challenge you to name a single one.)

Twitter/X isn’t the real world — it’s more progressive and much more politically engaged. So it’s striking that the tweet, viewed 1.8 million times, garnered a paltry 800 likes. Olympic medallist and national treasure Sharron Davies captured the mood of the replies with “Just maybe if you’d stood up for women, girls, their rights & their safeguarding things might have been different.”

Founded in 2015 by lesbian comedian Sandi Toksvig and former journalist Catherine Mayer, WEP aimed not so much to see its candidates elected but to force mainstream parties to add woman-friendly measures to their manifestos. It should have been a winning offer: its launch coincided with a remarkable resurgence in grassroots feminism.

But several other women’s rights organisations set up around the same time, with less fanfare and far less money, have achieved far more. The tiny charity FiLiA now runs Europe’s largest annual feminist conference. The 60-plus local groups of Women’s Rights Network got the National Police Chiefs’ Council to withdraw rules allowing female suspects to be intimately searched by male officers who identify as women.

Fair Play For Women used a lightning judicial review to force the Office for National Statistics to abandon plans to count self-identified gender rather than sex in the 2021 census.

Sex Matters, a small human rights charity I work for part-time, gathered 100,000 signatures calling on the government to fix equality law so that the poorly-drafted provisions for gender recognition don’t break discrimination protections for women. That proposal made it onto the Tories’ election manifesto. And this month, grassroots group For Women Scotland is taking a case on the same topic to the Supreme Court.

It’s been the most active decade in women’s rights activism since the 1970s, when women won equal pay and set up domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres. To misquote Frank Sinatra, if the Women’s Equality Party couldn’t make it then, it couldn’t make it anywhen.

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Perhaps part of the problem was that dilettantes got bored of play-acting politics when it turned out to be hard, slow and unglamorous. But the main issue was WEP’s inability to give a straight answer to the question of the moment — “What is a woman?” It’s bad enough for general purpose politicians to prove too spineless to give a straight answer to such a straight question; for supposed specialists in women’s rights, it was fatal.

The whole point of WEP was to craft policies for women — the 50 per cent of humanity who grow 100 per cent of the babies. The half whose personal and professional lives are shaped by the realities of reproduction in a way that the other half’s aren’t. The half who are physically weaker and overwhelmingly on the sharp end of the sexual violence. But you can’t even start to design such policies, let alone implement them, if you pretend that men can be women.

The year WEP was founded, the Women and Equalities parliamentary select committee undertook an inquiry into “transgender equality”. It had been captured by postmodernist identity politics, and it recommended gender self-ID — letting everyone choose their own sex for legal purposes. WEP descended into civil war. Even as many members argued against self-ID, its leaders started referring to their constituency as “all women, including trans women” — that is, actual women and men who wish they were women and want to force everyone else to play along.

But validating men’s identity claims isn’t just different from supporting women, it’s inimical to it. And so an organisation founded to support women started to argue that women should put up and shut up, and men should have whatever they want.

In a speech last year at the Cambridge Union, Toksvig argued that since intelligence is a spectrum, so is everything else, including sex. (How do we divide people into men and women, then?) “Stop worrying about how to make sport fair; sport is already unfair,” she told her audience, and “stop talking about the bloody toilets.”

So much for female athletes who want fair competition — you know, like the male ones have. Or women who think it’s not too much for women to demand public facilities that are safe for them to use. The dismissive, contemptuous tone is striking.

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WEP is a perfect example of what happens when a mission-driven organisation falls victim to a lie. It doesn’t merely wander off course, it gets completely turned around and becomes what it was founded to fight.

Everything in the organisation is set up to focus on the mission, so that’s where things break. WEP has no position on, say, inflation targeting or synthetic phonics. But what about giving fathers the same rights to parental leave as mothers, or getting rid of laws against sexual encounters when one party is deceived as to the sex of the other — so-called sex by deception?

Such questions matter profoundly for women’s substantive equality, since they concern situations where sex-blindness — formal equality — works to disadvantage women. But WEP was unable to consider them, let alone come up with good policies, because it was starting from the false premise that “women” includes men. That makes you blind to the fact that women and men are irreducibly different in ways that require policy responses if you want women to be, you know, equal.

The same pattern is visible in a host of other institutions and organisations that have bought the gender-identity lie.

Take Stonewall, which was founded in the 1980s to fight homophobia, in particular Section 28, the infamous rule banning schools and councils from “promoting homosexuality”, which hamstrung attempts to stop homophobic bullying. Stonewall is now all in on gender self-ID, which leads it to campaign for easier social transition and access to puberty blockers for trans-identifying children.

Prominent amongst such children are many who are destined to grow up gay. The treatment they’re being subjected to is more brutal than even the most vitriolic homophobe of the 1980s would have dreamed of. And yet it is being touted by our premier gay rights organisation.

Or take the NSPCC, Britain’s largest children’s charity, which has long promoted safeguarding principles that include separating places where children change and sleep by sex — for obvious reasons. But it tells sports organisations that “trans girls” — that is, boys who identify as girls — should be allowed to use the girls’ changing rooms, and vice versa.

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The British Humanist Association says it aims to “make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence”. But in 2019 its then president, Alice Roberts — who trained as a doctor and holds a professorship in public engagement in science — endorsed gender self-ID, citing the ability of clownfish to change sex and the fact that in seahorses it is the males who gestate the fertilised eggs. (In case it’s not obvious, humans aren’t clownfish. Or seahorses.)

Two years later the American Humanist Association withdrew an award it had bestowed a quarter-century earlier on eminent scientist and freethinker Richard Dawkins because he asked why progressives accept men identifying as women when they are so outraged by white people identifying as black.

Sometimes financial pressures can bring for-profit organisations back on course after ideology-driven missteps. But non-profits that lose their way tend to stagger on, causing the very harm they were set up to counter, until their funding runs out. The only alternative is to kill them off. It can’t happen fast enough.

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Our apologies: an earlier version of this piece said the British rather than the American Humanist Association had withdrawn their award from Richard Dawkins.