Maya Forstater

Again, I'll refer to the statistics. You are using a hypothetical case to generate concern about a wave of trans people sweeping aside women from panels. It just doesn't happen with enough frequency to really matter in the grand scheme of things.

You seem to be intent on pitching this as an inherently zero sum issue. While we can all come up with cases where there are these trade offs, it seems to go against the spirit of making panels more diverse in general, as Alice pointed out.

The pledge is kinda zero sum -between the man who has made it & the woman who might take his place (assuming not a flexibly sized panel). I don't understand why it's not in spirit of diversity for *that* man to ask (as he wld normally) for the organiser to include a female expert

If there is one trans person on the panel who considers themselves a woman, then it does them a huge disservice to say "that person isn't a woman, we need an actual woman." But it is perfectly legit to say "we need more women on this panel, I'm going make space for another"

Sorry, due respect but I think this thread gets the question wrong. The point of the #manel pledge is that cisgendered men experience an immense amount of privilege and we should take our panel invitations as an opportunity to put that privilege in check and elevate other voices.

I'm not sure how the pledge was formulated, but if it says "the panel needs one woman" (leading to the above dissection) then it was mis-formulated. The pledge should be "the panel can't be all cisgendered men".

The original wording was "At a public conference I won’t serve on a panel of two people or more unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the Chair.”

Given that pledge wording, I don't understand what your objection is. A trans woman is a woman - seems quite simple & straightforward. It seems frankly odd that you are talking about diversity while seemingly being openly hostile towards trans people.