Paul Knaggs at the TUC Conference:
Read Motion 17 as many times as you like. Count every line, every clause, every one of its two hundred-odd words. You will not find the word “woman” anywhere in it. Not once. Not “women,” not “sex,” not “female,” not “girls.” A motion built entirely around reversing the practical effect of a Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of sex under British equality law manages, across five resolutions and four sub-clauses of condemnation, never to mention the people that judgment was about.
That is not an oversight. It is the whole story.
On Monday 14 September, delegates at the TUC Congress in Brighton carried Motion 17, “Oppose the EHRC Code of Practice (Services, Public Functions and Associations),” without a recorded opposing speaker and without, as far as any published account shows, a card vote. It came from the TUC’s LGBT+ Conference, was moved on the floor by Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union, and was endorsed for the General Council by the TUC’s Assistant General Secretary, Kate Bell. It commits the entire trade union movement, nearly five and a half million working people, to campaign for the reintroduction of gender self-declaration into UK law. And it does so while treating the women whose legal protections are actually at stake as a subject too awkward to name….
Women in these unions pay the same subscriptions, staff the same picket lines, and built no small part of the movement’s moral authority. They are owed more than a motion that discusses their rights without ever naming them. If the TUC wants to campaign for trans self-declaration, it should have the courage to say so plainly, and the honesty to say plainly what that campaign would cost the women whose legal protections it is designed to reverse. Anything less is not solidarity. It is a movement that has learned to talk about half its members by pretending not to see them.
A trade union movement that cannot say the word “women” while legislating over their rights has not found a diplomatic form of words. It has found a way to stop being honest with itself.
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