Julian: So hello and welcome to today's podcast. I'm here today with Kiri Tunks, who is one of the founders of Woman's Place UK (WPUK). Kiri, thank you very much for giving up your time for us this evening. I thought maybe we could just start with you telling us a bit about how Woman's Place came to be founded and what the motivations behind that were.

Kiri: So we came into this debate around the time that Maria MacLachlan was assaulted at Hyde Park. We were very concerned that women attempting to meet, to discuss concerns they had about their sex-based rights were being prevented from doing that. And we couldn't believe that it was happening. And we said, well, hang on a minute. That can't be right, we will put together a group that makes sure that women's voices are heard in this consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) because they need to be heard they are going to be affected by the changes to the law. And that's where we came in. 

Julian: And I think it's right to say that Woman's Place is broadly speaking from a socialist background. Is that right? 

Kiri: Yeah. I mean, a few of us had been talking before we started WPUK about issues and so on, so we'd started to make contacts but broadly it's women from trade unions, from health service, from academia and some women's sector organisations, but yeah, I would say from the left, from a socialist left from people with strong records in fighting against inequality, challenging injustice, you know, people with good records on campaigning for people's rights. 

Julian: And obviously one of the things that's been said about WPUK if you go on Twitter or other social media channels, is that you are literally fascists so that seems to sit very uncomfortably with a background of socialist feminism, trade unions and so on. How has that happened?

Kiri: Well, I think what happens is when people don't have arguments, they just chuck mud. And of course the worst thing that you can call a socialist is a fascist. As a socialist feminist, as a woman who has been very involved in anti-racist activity, that's a pretty bad thing to call you.

I think it's just a meant to distract, to slur, to cast dispersions, to avoid having the very reasonable discussion that we want to have. So I think it’s a tactic, to be honest, and it hasn't deterred us, we know we're not, and we're not going to get side-tracked by stupid comments like that.

Julian: So the five aims that you've started with, can you talk us through those? Some of the people listening, won't be familiar with those.

Where did those come from and what, what are you aiming to achieve? 

Kiri: So the first thing was to say that women have a right to be consulted on matters that concern them. And they have a right to speak about things and to be heard and to make their points and to do that without being threatened or feel any fear of violence and so on. So that was one of the first things that we wanted to assert. 

We wanted to assert the fact that women should be consulted on things. It wasn't just enough for women to get together and talk about it themselves. Actually, the bodies that were making these decisions, as far as we could see, hadn't got a good record of actually consulting women widely and getting a wide view of perspectives on it. And so we wanted to make sure that a wider group of perspectives was heard on this.

And to enable women who didn't know how to access that conversation, that public debate to make sure that they had the tools so that they could make their voices heard. Because I think a lot of women are disenfranchised. They don't know how the systems work. 

We said, contact your MP and they said, am I allowed to do that? You know? We seem to be operating in a very deficit model of democracy. 

So again, it was about making sure those voices were heard. We wanted to assert the fact that sex-based exemptions exist in law, that we weren't arguing for anything new, that we were simply arguing for the law to be upheld.

And we've been attacked heavily for that as though, as though demanding those sex-based rights was some terrible things. This is the law as it exists at the moment. Many women did not know that those sex-based exemptions existed.

So it was a bit of consciousness-raising a bit of enabling a bit of empowering and a bit of stamping our feet, to be honest.

Julian: And what do you think would be the consequences if we were to replace sex-based rights with gender-based rights? Because I think a lot of people don't see any distinction between those two. 

Kiri: So WPUK is very clear that gender is socially constructed and that sex is a biological fact. We think that if you don't recognise sex, then you don't accept that there is sexism.

And we think that sexism is at the root of a lot of women's oppression, that there are material facts of women's lives that need to be addressed by law, by a change of culture. And that just calling it gender will stop us being able to address those problems. So for us, recognising the reality of sex, recognising that many of the oppressions that women face are because of society's inability to cope with that sex-based reality. That's the problem and calling it something else, isn't going to take those problems away. So it's very important for us that we say what it is and then we can fight it. 

Julian: I've heard, I think everybody has heard is that if you say sex-based rights, you're talking about women being oppressed by virtue of their biology, their reproductive capacity in particular, does that make us essentialists? Does that make WPUK an essentialist model?

Kiri:  No, we're realists. We're not the ones oppressing women because of their biology. We are observing that that is what society is doing to women and we are challenging that.

So we are not the essentialists. We are not the people that reduce women to terms like menstruators or vagina havers or cervix owners. I mean, that is biological essentialism.

We are noting the reality of sex and we are noting that one sex is oppressed and discriminated against because of society's inability to deal with that material reality and we are challenging that.

Julian: And in an ideal world, if WPUK is successful in all of the five demands that you started with and the resolutions from this year what would that utopian society look like? 

Kiri: So when we started WPUK, we wanted to make sure that women had a voice at the table in the discussion around the GRA.

But we quickly realised what a paltry state women's rights were in and that our fight would actually have to be bigger and that we would have to start reasserting some things that we thought were accepted and everybody knew that was right. And we started to realise that some of the things we thought we had won, we hadn't really won.

So we expanded our remit out from there. And we're doing that again. We're launching a manifesto on Monday, which is a call-out to all the political organisations about the things that we think will need to change in this country and globally, some of them, to make sure that women are equal citizens in this society.

So we are looking at things like economic inequality. We're looking again at violence against women and girls. We're looking at the issues of migrant women and refugee women. We're looking at the whole question of the criminal justice system, which is failing women on a daily basis in so many was it’s absolutely disgraceful. We're looking at education and healthcare. 

So we've got these big kind of areas and we've got very specific demands that we want political parties to put into place to actually make real change in women's lives. So we've got quite ambitious now about what we're demanding, because actually we think it's what is necessary.

Julian: So when you started, what did you think at the time? What was your plan at the time and how has that changed? 

Kiri: So when we started, we had a very short term vision. We wanted to make sure women could access this discussion about the GRA. We were angry that women who wanted to meet and discuss these questions were being shut down and were being threatened and in fact assaulted.

So we wanted to demonstrate that we would meet that we would make it possible for women to have the discussions. And we want it to put pressure on the decision-makers to realise they couldn't just do this stuff without consulting us, but it was very specifically around the GRA. And of course we expected that to be quite a short period. 3 months.

And then of course, the response to the GRA and the whole debate that happened around that meant that it got stretched out and it took much, much longer. And so the whole campaign had to be sustained for a much longer period. And it was during that time that we started to realise actually all the other things that were wrong about, about the situation for women.

So the campaign evolved.

We learned that by running that campaign, how poorly women were being served actually and how badly they were being treated. And so out of that, we started to evolve our demands into longer-term more specific things that we thought society needed to do. Now we've become a much broader women's rights campaign, which is not what we were expecting when we started.

Julian: With the GRA Reforms, I think what was proposed, certainly by some of the lobbying groups by Stonewall and associated groups was the complete removal of all women's sex-based exemptions. Can you see any justification for that? Can you see their side of that proposition at all? 

Kiri: I think if you've put into law structures or processes or provisions to ameliorate a group's oppression. You don't remove them unless the oppression has gone. And women's oppression is very, very real it's very under-recognised and it's been ignored and dismissed. So the idea that women would agree to the removal of hard won legal rights at a time when the situation of women I think is getting worse, is just fanciful. 

There was no way that women were going to tolerate that once they realise what was happening. We want everybody to have rights. We want everybody to be treated with dignity. We want people to be free from harassment. We want people to have access to health care, to homes, to jobs, and we absolutely support the rights of trans people to have those things.

 But what we were demanding really was an honest conversation about where the rights of trans women, trans people and women were the same where they diverged because there will be different needs for those two groups and where inevitably, sometimes they are going to conflict.

And where there is a conflict, we have to have an honest conversation about that and come to a resolution. You cannot have one group being told they have to give up the rights they fought for because another group wants to access them. That’s not how democracy works. So I think we need a proper conversation and real pragmatic solutions.

Julian: Where do you say solutions lie? Is that something that is within your remit or hosting the discussion? 

Kiri: Yeah. I mean, I think as a group, we are quite a mixed group of people and we've come together with agreement on specific things and we were quite a tight campaign, we have different ideas amongst us about what would work and what wouldn't work.

I don't think we've got any definite proposals that we would put to the world and say, we've got the answers. I think like you say, we feel our job has been to make the space for that conversation to take place and we genuinely feel that there will not be any solutions until, and unless that conversation takes place. So for us, that is the most important thing. 

I think once you get all those different perspectives in the room, you see what people actually need, we get people having honest conversations about resourcing and about priorities and so on, and a bit of respect in the conversation. I do think there will be answers. At the minute it's, it's quite foggy out there and it's a bit hard to see what they're going to be. But there will be solutions. There will be. We have to find a way through this. 

Julian: And we see in other countries that there have been different solutions. Just to take two extremes, you have Canada where you have complete self-ID, a woman and a man is whatever any individual says that they are.

On the other end you have, for example, recent judgment in Hong Kong, that before you can transition your gender, you must be sterilised, which is obviously illegal to the European Convention on Human Rights. So between those two polar opposites: Do you see any difficulties with the Canadian regime for example?

Kiri: There's certainly enough stories from what's happening in Canada. We've got Meghan Murphy speaking at a meeting on Monday. So hopefully we'll hear more about that. I think there are problems with what's happening in Canada. Of course, the example you've given in Hong Kong is absolutely horrific and that's not something that we want. We want everybody to have live their lives free from exactly that kind of thing. People need to be able to live their lives freely without fear of violence or oppression and so on. 

I don't think we need to think in those two extremes. I mean, you know, people often talk about the Irish situation and say, it's fine over there, but actually in Ireland, they've got a much more nuanced system. I don't think people realise that. 

So they do have a self-ID system, but it works within an equality legal framework that actually does weigh up the rights of all people in Ireland. And actually if it's working in Ireland and it hasn't been audited yet, but if it is working in Ireland, perhaps that's why, perhaps because there is provision for everybody's rights and that's what I think we need to be looking at in this country, a system that takes into account everybody's needs, takes into account everybody's rights. Doesn't pit one set of oppressed people against another, but actually comes up with really pragmatic solutions. 

And I think some of that is going to take money. And I think it's going to take a lot of conversations, but unless we start having that conversation, we're not going to get there.

Julian: WPUK has hosted a number of those conversations.

Can you tell us a bit about how those have been received both by the audiences and by those who perhaps are less enthusiastic? 

Kiri: So we've had 22 meetings and we've been surprised actually at the popularity of them, all of them have been pretty much sold out.

The heightened tension around them has made them very difficult to arrange. And it's ridiculous actually, because I think a lot of the lobbying and the activity that goes around trying to stop those meetings that have included, you know, threats to the venue, threats to individuals, we had a bomb threat, you know, all sorts of slurring, libellous articles in student newspapers and so on and in and in mainstream press.

These are from people who have never very rarely have actually been to one of the meetings. And when we have had people come in, we've had mainstream journalists come in and they've come out. And they said, well, it was completely different to what I expected, because it is literally largely a group of women, reasonable well-behaved respectful women sitting in the room talking about their rights.

The atmosphere in the meetings is really something else actually. There's a real electricity in the room, which is exciting, but also a little bit depressing. The excitement is about the freedom that women have of being together in a room to discuss something they've been told they can't discuss and to find themselves with people who are supporting them and respecting them and engaging in a, in a really good way. 

So there's that electricity and that excitement, but isn't that depressing that that should be so exciting. The idea of being in a room with women to talk about stuff that concerns you, that shouldn't be exciting. That should just be normal.

So I think it's a problem that our meetings are exciting because that says something about the state of our democracy. 

Julian: I know that there have been trans women who have spoken at WPUK I've also seen criticism that you're essentially just using these people as convenient passes.

What would you say to that? 

Kiri: So, all our meetings, we negotiate with the local groups and we asked them who they want to speak.  Certainly in the early days, I think people were very interested to hear what gender critical trans women had to say and wanted them on the platform. And I think that the speeches that we've had from those trans women have been absolutely brilliant and have added a fantastic dimension to the conversation.

They've come under an awful lot of attack for speaking out, and I think they're incredibly brave. I think it's the right thing to do. We were trying to have a dialogue about the Gender Recognition Act and these were people that were affected by that. 

We have had contributions from trans people in the audience as well. Some of them critical of our position, some of them supporting our position. As a group that wants to promote dialogue, we think that's a good thing. 

We've had people say things from our platform that we don't always agree with. And we say that we platform people, not because we necessarily agree with them, but we think it's important to hear what people have got to say and challenge people and discuss those things.

I think it was absolutely the right thing to do in terms of breaking open that discussion and making sure that we had it. It was the right thing to do. The idea that we're using anybody is ridiculous. 

All the people that have come on our platform have come willingly and have come because they've wanted to be part of the debate and knowingly that they're going to put themselves out in the limelight and have to deal with all the brickbats and the abuse that follows. Everybody that has spoken at our meetings has been incredibly brave. 

People sometimes say, why haven't you had different trans voices? Initially the first meeting, that Maria MacLachlan was going to, that was meant to be a debate with different perspectives and different voices and the opposites, you know, the other side pulled out, didn't want to do it. And I think that's been the history of a lot of these meetings. Where people have tried to organise platforms with different perspectives, trans activists with a different position to us have refused to come on and have hoped to shut the debate down in that way. 

I suppose why we haven't platformed or invited critical trans voices onto our platforms is that we don't think that's our job.

Our job is very women-centred. Our job is making sure that women's voices, gender critical voices were heard. And so that's what has been our priority. It is not our job to platform the other side, we think that there are other organisations who have a Public Sector Equality Duty to foster good relationships between different equality strands that should be doing that.

There are groups that have public funding from the government. There are councils, there are political parties who could have taken a really mature role in this that could have said ‘We want to bring these different perspectives together, these differing voices, these opposites. And we want to bring them together in a spirit of mutual respect and dialogue. And this is how the meeting's going to happen, and it's going to be safe for everybody. And it's going to be respectful.’

Those are the people that should be fostering that balanced panel. It is not the job of a women's rights organisation to accommodate and to promote the views of people that disagree with them.

Julian: So just before we finish. Those who are listening to this podcast. Do you have a message for them that you'd like to get across in particular? other than please do attend WPUK meetings and what action can women take to support sex-based rights in the UK?

Kiri: Okay. So first of all, we want women to start organising themselves where they live in their towns, in their villages, in their cities, getting together with other women and organising meetings on matters of interest to them, anything that is of concern to them, they should be getting politically active and politically involved and they should know they've got every right to do that. 

We're happy to help give guidance on how to go about doing that. We have got a long running campaign of getting councils and other organisations to properly, cite the protected characteristics, too many of those groups have replaced sex with gender, therefore misleading and misguiding their citizens about their rights.

We think that that is having an impact on policy. So they're making bad policy that is affecting women's rights. We want women and men to challenge that. If your council has got gender instead of sex, as a protected characteristic, we want you to contact the council and ask them to change it. And there is guidance on our website.

 And the last thing we want you to do this as a new action. We will be launching soon our manifesto. We are issuing it in the expectation that politicians will look at it and devise policies that are going to make real change in women's lives. So we want every single person listening to this podcast to get hold of our manifesto, to send it to that MP, that MSP, their AM in Wales and we want you to say to your political representative, this is what women need in this country. I want to see it in your party's manifesto. I want to see you making decisions that are along these lines and taking actions that are going to make these things political reality.

 So that is going to be a really important campaign in the run-up to whenever the election finally happens.

Julian: Kiri, thank you so much for speaking to me this evening, it's been a real pleasure. I'm sure that we will meet again at a WPUK meeting or FiLiA. 

Kiri: Thanks very much.