Assembly election: All main non-unionist candidates refuse to answer simple question on women’s rights

The survey was completed yesterday in the same week as another feminist campaign group, Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, erected billboards near the junctions of the M2 and M3 motorways in central Belfast.

The message on it reads: ‘Dear MLA candidates, What Is A Woman? RespectmySeX.’

The parties were given a deadline of April 15 by SFWNI to answer the question and reply with either Yes, No or Didn’t Care To Answer.

The News Letter has seen SFWNI’s tabulated findings which show that the Alliance Party, Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Green Party, People Before Profit and the other smaller left-wing parties were ‘Didn’t Care To Answer’.

DUP, UUP and TUV candidates alongside a number of independents as well as the nationalist Aontu party all said ‘No’ to the question.

Commenting on the responses from the political parties and candidates, a spokeswoman for SFWNI said: “Many of our members have expressed the view that they feel politically homeless. This election is not about orange or green issues – it is about the sex-based rights and protection of women.

“Women are uniting across divides (as they do), to protect our sex-based rights to privacy, dignity, safety and language.

“Why is it that our political representatives cannot answer a simple question about child safeguarding?

“The same political representatives who stood in Stormont only weeks ago and gave apologies to survivors of historical institutional abuse for failing them, are now not listening to women when we speak up against safeguarding concerns and the medicalisation of children.”

The SFWNI spokesperson added: “Our questions to politicians have been dismissed as ‘bad faith’ by some prominent representatives and party leaders ... the dismissal is bad faith. Suggesting that a straightforward question about adult males in underage female spaces is complex-to-answer is bad faith.”

Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland (WRNNI) sent a more detailed list of questions to the political parties connected to the trans-rights controversy, which has put pressure on UK Labour leader Keir Starmer to define a woman either by biology or self-identification of gender.

Mr Starmer has been accused by traditional feminist organisations of failing to give a definitive answer.

The questions which were sent to all the parties’ press officers at the start of the election campaign are:

1. What is a woman?

2. Should schools have separate toilets for male and female students?

3. Can men be lesbians?

4. Is it OK to place male patients on women’s single-sex wards in hospitals?

5. Is it OK for males to compete in female sports?

A spokeswoman for the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland said they had received no responses to their questions from the parties’ press officers and media centres. However, both the TUV and DUP said their candidates have individually replied with ‘No’ to the questions posed by the feminist campaigners.

The WRNNI spokeswoman continued: “We are tired of seeing our political representatives stuttering and stumbling over this very simple question, especially when the answer affects 51% of the population.

“The word Woman is not up for debate – it means adult human female.”

TUV Lagan Valley candidate Lorna Smyth said her party is clear that a woman is “an adult female and her sex is determined at birth. It is important and it is immutable”.

She added: “It is disturbing that some want to live in a society where biological reality is ignored.

“If one were to have said a few years ago that the issue of what a woman is would become an election issue I have no doubt that people would have reacted with bemusement.”