As I am finally putting the chaos of November behind me I can get back to posting my reports from the Women’s Equality Party Conference. This is from the Saturday.

Saturday began with a brief, introductory business session, after which my first order of business was some trans solidarity. There was a discussion session on housing policy, and one of the speakers was Jack Munroe who is famously non-binary. As far as I knew at the time, Jack was the only other trans person who was going to be at Conference and I wanted to show support.

The fine detail of housing policy is beyond my experience, but it was very clear from the session that the rental market in the UK is a mess. The Welsh and Scottish authorities have gone some way towards sorting things out, but England remains stubbornly dysfunctional. The fact that I have to rent because I can’t afford to buy because people buying to rent are driving up house prices is merely a minor part of the problem. I have rented homes in Australia and California as well as the UK, and I would much rather be in either of those two places than England.

Something that became very obvious during the housing panel is that the Victoria Warehouse was totally unsuitable for breakout sessions of this type. It is, as you might expect, a converted warehouse, and upstairs is supposed to have several separate conference rooms. They didn’t even bother with airwalls for this. They just have railings with blackout curtains to separate the “rooms”. You could hear everything being said in adjacent rooms and some of the panellists had trouble making themselves heard. When we got to questions, the lack of microphone technique on the part of people asking questions was a major issue.

Anyway, Jack did a great job despite the sound issues. We had a brief chat afterwards because I wanted to check a few non-binary issues with them before my workshops. Then it was time to attend Sophie Walker’s keynote speech.

By the time Sophie took the stage the programme was running slightly behind time. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but having arrived on time for Sophie’s speech I caught the end of a very powerful presentation by Gudrun Schyman from the Feministiskt Initiativ, the Swedish Feminist Party. I think that is the first time I have ever heard a political leader talk about the importance of love in politics.

Sophie is a very good speaker. Sandi Toksvig says that she learned on the job, which I guess gives hope to the rest of us. The substance of the speech was good too. While she steered away from potentially controversial jargon, Sophie did talk about how various oppressions “intersect”. I’m sure that she did that deliberately. Much of the power of her stance comes from her position as the mother of an autistic child. She might be a leader of a political party, but she still has to interact with social services on a regular basis. She was involved in disability activism before she became involved with WEP.

I had to skip the end of Sophie’s speech as I wanted to be on time for starting my first workshop even if no one was there. It is probably just as well I did, because no one seemed to be in charge of tech. I had brought a laptop just in case, and got it connected to the projector before anyone arrived. When a tech guy from the venue turned up later he said there were no laptops available. I’m glad I had a backup plan.

We started around 15 minutes late, and the first workshop was fairly sparsely attended. However, by the time I got around to the third session (each workshop ran multiple times to give people a chance to see more than one) we were more or less back on time and the room was packed. I mostly managed to make myself heard, despite having some loud presentations behind me and at the back of the room. As we had no roving mic, I had to stand next to whoever was asking a question then repeat it into the mic for the audience.

I got a lot of questions, for which I was very grateful because the whole point of the workshops was to dispel myths on trans issues. For example, I was twice asked why there are so many more people transitioning from male to female than from female to male. The truth is, of course, that the media is obsessed with trans women whereas trans men are able to mostly fly under the radar.

To my surprise and relief, the current campaign against trans kids being waged by the Daily Malice and New Statesman appears to have mostly escaped the notice of WEP members. There were no TERFs at conference, probably because you had to be a party member to attend and the TERFs hate intersectional feminism so they won’t join.

By far the most common question I was asked – I think six separate people over the course of the weekend – was whether I thought I would not have needed to transition if I’d had a less gendered upbringing. There seems to be a common view among cis feminists that if only trans women had been allowed to play with dolls and wear pretty clothes during childhood they would be happy to grow up to be effeminate men. I’m sorry folks, but this borders on gaslighting. Most trans people I know, and most parents of trans kids as well, have tried everything they could to avoid transitioning, and only come to transition as a last resort. The idea that all of the self-harm, the suicide attempts, the psychotherapy, the expensive and painful surgery, the loss of friends, family and career, could all have been avoided by better parenting seems frankly ridiculous to me.

I should note also that most of the (quack) psychiatric theories about the “causes” of being trans revolve around upbringing not being gendered enough. Trans “cures” pushed by (mainly male) psychiatrists always involved forcing boy children to “man up”. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that cis women think that my being trans is a result of too masculine an upbringing while cis men think that it is a result of too feminine an upbringing. I have only one thing to say to this:

Stop blaming mothers! Please.

That said, I am all in favour of creating a less gender-obsessed society, both for children and adults. If that leads to a reduction in the number of trans people I will be surprised but pleased. My gut feel is that it will result in the same number of people needing full medical transition, but a significant increase in the number of people identifying as non-binary.

Several people approached me during the weekend, both in person and on social media, to say how useful they had found the workshops. No one has complained to me directly. Hopefully party HQ will tell me if they received any complaints, but my initial impression of the weekend is Mission Accomplished.

One of the people who approached me later in the weekend said that they identified as non-binary. So that made at least three trans people in attendance. I’m pretty sure that there were more, but I don’t ask.

A quick shout out here is appropriate for Stella Duffy, whom I have met before and chatted with occasionally on Twitter. She spent the afternoon running an Open Space session. The purpose of this was to provide a venue in which people who felt that the party was still ignoring their concerns could come and have a voice. One of the most obvious complaints was the lack of mention of climate change in Sophie’s speech. Kudos to Stella for doing this because it is a damn hard thing to moderate but the feedback will be invaluable to the party.

Something else that happened when I was otherwise engaged was the cross-party panel. This saw women members of other major political parties in discussion with WEP leaders on a variety of issues. The Tories sent Nicky Morgan, who is the Minister for Women and Equalities. The Greens sent their deputy leader, Amelia Womack. The LibDems sent their candidate for the Richmond Park by-election, whom both WEP and the Greens are supporting. Labour, in the sort of own goal that is depressingly familiar these days, declined to participate.

There was a second set of workshop sessions following mine. Because I needed to decompress for a while, and also vote in the Steering Committee and Policy Committee elections, I missed the first two sessions. I had just settled into the final session of the PR workshop, being run by the party’s comms team, when a fire alarm went off.

It appeared to be a real alarm, so we all trouped off and followed the green signs down the nearest staircase. I never got to the bottom, because people at the front turned round and started coming back up. The only explanation for that was that the fire exit door on that staircase was locked. Thankfully we were able to find another staircase quickly, and it wasn’t too cold outside.

The probable cause of the alarm was smoke from the food stalls in the venue. Obviously all of the catering was shut down during the alarm. When we got back in it was around 17:00 and people were starting to think about dinner. We were initially told that food would be available again in 20 minutes, but after an hour we were told that there would be no further food service that evening save for the paid banquet. My friends from the Bath branch headed out in search of a restaurant. As a speaker I had a ticket for the VIP reception due to start at any moment. Thankfully I was able to find a sandwich at the bar, and the reception had some food too.

The evening entertainment was an all-woman comedy show hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring an excellent line-up of talent headlined by Sara Pascoe. The other acts were Vic McGlynn, Cally Beaton, Jenny Collier, Ada Campe and Yuriko Kotani. They were all very good, and I was particularly impressed by Yuriko.

Having been at the VIP party, I spent the evening up on the mezzanine level in a booth with, among others, Stella Duffy and Sophie Walker. That might seem unbearably swank of me, and I could have easily popped downstairs and sat with the Bath branch. However, I wanted to prove a point. People are apparently still questioning whether trans women are welcome in WEP. Well, on the Saturday of the party’s first conference, I spent the evening drinking prosecco in a VIP box with the party leader and one of its most senior members. How much more welcome can you get?

Also in that box was the head of the advertising company that gave their time and expertise to create the party logo. We had a chat, as part of which she explained to me the rationale behind the logo being available in a wide variety of colours. Most political parties have a specific colour by which they are recognised: blue for Tories, red for Labour and so on. WEP has taken a deliberate decision to use a variety of colours to indicate the non-partisan nature of what we do. I note that a by-product of this is that WEP is a rainbow party.

The comedy show ended around 23:00 after which there was a disco. I gave the DJ a few chances before giving up and going back to my hotel. Having decided that she wasn’t going to play my sort of music I collected my coat and was just heading out the door when she put on “Tainted Love”. Ah well, I needed the sleep. Sunday was going to be busy.