WPUK corrects Pink News

We are aware of a report about WPUK funding on a site which purports to publish news articles. We do not consider this site to be a legitimate source of news and we do not link.

Please see here for a previous statement in relation to this ‘news’ site.

We will not respond to all the half-baked claims and insinuations masquerading as journalism in this piece. Many of the errors in the report could have been avoided by diligent journalistic research which it is not our job to provide.

Pink News falsehoods about WPUK

However, there are some falsehoods which must be corrected:

• WPUK did not form in 2018. We formed in 2017 after Maria MacLachlan was assaulted in Hyde Park.
• We are a women’s rights campaign dedicated to ensuring women’s voices are heard and our sex-based rights upheld. This is neither hateful nor transphobic. On the contrary, it is in line with UK and international law.
• The allegation that a speaker at one of our meetings referred to ‘transgender people as “horrible, hateful misogynistic bastards”’ is false. The speaker was referring to specific trans activists (not all of them trans) in her local Labour CLP who had bullied and harassed her out of the party. Read our statement on this here.
• Apart from the one donation identified in our financial statement , which is pending verification, our donors are not ‘mysterious’. We know who they are but we will not put the names of individuals into the public domain.

We are a campaign run entirely by volunteers who do this work on top of jobs and other responsibilities. WPUK funding relies on women and men who support what we do. You can read our financial statement here to see what we have done with this grassroots funding.

We are disappointed to see the same old canards about WPUK funding and our campaign regurgitated despite the fact that we have refuted them time and time again.

We have recently published this WPUK MythBusters to address the most common myths about our campaign.

WPUK funding and Lush grant

WPUK welcomed the statement made by Lush on 30 November about its grant to our campaign and we share the concerns expressed in that statement about the toxicity of debate. We have been on the receiving end of that toxicity since our inception. Like Lush, we are very keen to see respectful debate. It is therefore disappointing that Lush has added to the toxicity of the discussion by making a further statement on 1 December in which they misrepresent our campaign. We are happy to discuss with Lush further, at any time, their misapprehensions.

We are very grateful to Lush for the generous grant of £3,000. This funding has helped us to ensure women’s voices have been heard in public debate. WPUK appreciates their clearly pluralist approach to grant giving. We applaud them in supporting the rights of a range of disadvantaged and oppressed groups.

We respect the decision Lush has subsequently made not to fund “campaigning work, discussion or lobbying on the specifics of the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act”. It is, after all, not the responsibility of private companies or businesses to facilitate respectful public debate. Too many companies have adopted easy virtue-signalling stunts without addressing the fundamental inequalities faced in society, including within their own business structures. Too often, such simplistic interventions have skewed discussion, exacerbated disadvantage and failed to tackle the underlying causes of inequality.

In the UK, public bodies have a duty to foster good relations between those with different protected characteristics, to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation prohibited by the Equality Act, and to advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.

We intend to continue making sure that such bodies do their job.

WPUK

1^st December 2020