Why is the Women’s Institute so desperate to let in men?

Shock horror – the Women’s Institute (WI) is an institute for women. Melissa Green, chief executive of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, announced this week that the 110-year-old organisation would no longer be accepting transgender women into its ranks.

WI did not come to this decision on its own, and certainly not willingly. Rather, it was strong-armed into it as a result of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the legal definition of ‘woman’ must be based on biology, not identity. Green made no secret about how distraught she was over this move, declaring that it had been made with the ‘utmost regret and sadness’ and stressing that the Supreme Court judgment had left her ‘no choice’. When publicising the changes, she said: ‘Incredibly sadly, we will have to restrict our membership on the basis of biological sex from April next year. But the message we really want to get across is that it remains our firm belief that transgender women are women, and that doesn’t change.’

Green also made it clear that she wanted transwomen to stay ‘part of the WI family’ and that, from April, it would launch new ‘sisterhood groups’ to act as ‘a place where we will recognise transgender women as women and explore what it is to be a woman in the 21st century’. Nonetheless, membership for WI proper will now only be available to those born female.

WI is probably one of the organisations you would have least expected to be captured by trans dogma. After all, the average member is over 50 years old and is more often found baking cakes, arranging flowers or making jam than screeching about the importance of respecting preferred pronouns and gender identities. Regardless, WI (like virtually every institution that exists today, no matter its actual purpose) has been sucked into the vortex of gender woo-woo.

As has Girlguiding, another group that, as its name suggests, should be a space for girls to meet and learn new skills. This week, the youth organisation announced ‘with a heavy heart’ that it, too, would no longer be able to accept transgender members. It made a similarly handwringing statement about how the Supreme Court ruling meant that this ‘difficult decision’ had to be reached. Nonetheless, it assured young members and their parents that Girlguiding still ‘believed strongly in inclusion’ and remained committed to ‘treating everyone with dignity and respect, particularly those from marginalised groups that have felt the biggest impact of this decision’. Whatever happened to teaching girls how to identify plants and read a compass? Why was it ever the case that they were encouraged to pretend that little boys could transfigure into little girls?

These supposedly female-only orgs are clearly devastated at the prospect of having to kick out blokes. No wonder – they’ve poured considerable amounts of time and energy into trying to convince their members that bepenised transwomen are women just like them. For 40 years, WI has, in its own words, ‘welcomed’ men into what should be a space for women, and women alone (the clue is literally in the name). In 2015, it made this trans-inclusive policy official. Under Green’s leadership, the WI magazine, WI Life, put a 74-year-old man called Petra Wenham on the cover, apparently not finding a worthy candidate among its hundreds of thousands of actual female members. In 2023, a group of such women launched an internal campaign to pressure WI to roll back the ‘inclusive’ policies that, in practice, excluded them. It was promptly rejected. Now, the WI leadership is perhaps mourning not the banning of a ‘marginalised group’ as such, but the defeat of its chosen ideology.

The fact that WI will now be solely for real women is something to cautiously celebrate. But the fact that WI intends to construct ‘sisterhood groups’ open to transwomen sends the message loud and clear that men are still welcome, and that those uppity women who demanded a space of their own are in the wrong. Its female members deserve to have an organisation just for them, without being made to feel guilty for it. Unfortunately for WI, and fortunately for the rest of us, it is the gender ideologues that are on the back foot now. Reality is, at last, reasserting itself.

Lauren Smith is a London-based columnist for the European Conservative.