Letters: Women’s Institute should resist transphobic ruling

Fight for trans+ rights

The Women’s Institute (WI) will no longer allow trans women to join or renew their memberships from April of next year.

It comes after the Supreme Court’s transphobic ruling about the legal definition of a woman. 

Melissa Green, the WI’s chief executive, has made clear that “this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice”. This month Girlguiding UK has also decided to exclude trans girls.

Unelected judges are dictating to women’s organisations who they can and cannot include as members.

We’re told by transphobic “activists” that this is to “protect” women and girls. The irony is that these rulings damage the existing rights of all women.

Courts can now enforce rigid definitions of who counts as a “real woman”.

It is the same biological essentialism historically used to exclude women from education and employment and confine them to unpaid domestic labour.

Trans women already face disproportionate unemployment, poverty, and workplace discrimination. Legally mandating their exclusion robs them of the same rights to privacy and security other women have.

Cisgender women do not need “protection” from trans women. This rhetoric only serves to divide us and reverse decades of progress.

We’ve been living, working and organising together for years.

Sally, Edinburgh

• Organisations should resist attempts to make them enforce the Supreme Court’s transphobic ruling.

If we refuse to implement it, the ban on trans women from women only spaces will become unworkable.

Georgia, Sunderland

Your Party repeats Labour’s mistake

Disappointment over Your Party is widespread— not least for me. I spent over two decades defending Jeremy Corbyn on the national executive of my union, UCU, and more recently.

A couple of hours viewing the first day of the conference displayed lofty ambition but strategic political ineptitude. And in Corbyn’s speech there wasn’t even a mention of the previous afternoon’s decision to expel some key activists on the ground.

This was a rerun of the Labour Party’s early decision in its 1925 conference to expel individual Communist Party members.

That cemented a chasmic gulf between parliamentarism and industrial and social struggles.

For all the talk of not wanting to create a Labour Party mark 2, that is precisely what the cabal around Corbyn is doing.

History may never repeat itself precisely but, tragically, repetition of the 1925 error is exactly what is in the air today.

Tom Hickey, Brighton

Server failures point to fragility of system

The latest Cloudflare outage is another reminder of how fragile and brittle the digital infrastructure is. 

Cloudflare servers, used by around 20 percent of all websites, went down just weeks after a major AWS server failure in October. That took banks, payment systems and various others offline.

What these failures really expose is just how concentrated the tech industry is.

A tiny number of corporations, most obviously Amazon and Microsoft, control the backbone of the internet, creating global single points of failure that we all depend on.

But they also expose something else—the immense power of workers in this industry.

When a handful of engineers can unintentionally bring half the internet to a halt, it shows how much more we could achieve intentionally.

In a system this centralised, workers hold extraordinary leverage to reshape the system in our interest.

Geraldine M, East London

Organising for Palestine

We had a really positive palestine solidarity organising meeting at St George’s hospital in Tooting last night. I believe that is our biggest ever organising meeting.

We agreed one of our main focuses in the coming months will be a campaign to kick Palantir out of the NHS. 

Five of those in our meeting then came over to join the Wandsworth Friends of Palestine organising meeting up the road. They were so eager to do joint work and develop links.

Ben, South London