The people who relied on the Old English medical charms my MA dissertation explores did not have Ankle Rehab Level 1. These charms incorporated aspects of pre-Christian practice, of Christian liturgy (as explored excellently by Ciaran Arthur in this volume), of different languages, and both words and actions. Several of these are to be repeated: take this salve for nine days and nine nights; sing nine Our Fathers; step three times over a grave. So much of the work of healing involved doing or saying the same thing again and again in order to reach the desired endpoint.

From a rational secular perspective, the early medieval English subscribed to a pile of mumbo-jumbo. From my perspective as an Anglican, the act of praying for healing is deeply Christian, yet these charms are often so syncretic as to no longer be recognisably so, and they offer a guaranteed supernatural cure rather than appealing to the mercy of God, who of course does not promise that He will cure your haemorrhoids or bring back your lost cattle. Yet the act of repetition being so closely tied to the healing process is not, I think, in itself wrong.

In Matthew 6:7, Jesus warns us against “vain repetitions” in prayer, “as the heathen do”. Growing up Catholic, I used to see this verse used against the Catholic practice of praying the Rosary. Whether the operative word here is “vain” or “repetitions” is something I see argued about online a lot by people who are much more knowledgeable than me, but I think to write off any repeated prayer or religious practice is to miss the point. Saying the Lord’s Prayer nine times may not be a guaranteed solution to your medical — or other — woes, but you will eventually get a lot better at praying it.

Similarly, before I ever relied on regular medication, I used to see the Eucharist compared to medicine without really grasping what people meant by this analogy. My overriding instinct when I feel anxious or tired or guilty is to avoid church and avoid praying in the hopes that hiding can solve all my problems (spoiler: it never does). Getting over this instinct and dragging myself to church has been, and is, intensely difficult. Frequently, turning up, praying and receiving Communion feels about as useful as standing on one leg. But I am learning that turning up and encountering Christ every week is what will strengthen me so that I can stand.

Firstly, I am opposed to AWS in general, for two main reasons. I don’t think that the identity boxes people tick matter as much as their views, skills and qualities as a candidate. This is not to say, however, that certain groups of people do not find it easier to stand for election than others, and this brings me to my second main reason.

The ways in which people could be disadvantaged in standing for election — gender, sexual orientation, race, disability, class , age— are often very nuanced and in some cases quite hard to define precisely. Take class, for example, which I think is a particularly large issue when it comes to politics. I can’t see how it would be possible to produce an all working-class shortlist — how are we defining class in this context? Parental income, for younger people (and at what stage in life would that stop mattering)? One’s own income? Education? Cultural capital? It would be very hard to come up with a set of definitive criteria which would allow or disallow a person from being placed on a class-based shortlist in an absolutely fair way.

I think that perhaps AWS are much easier to produce and implement than most other identity-based shortlists; there will generally be no shortage of women in a local Labour party who are able and willing to stand, and “woman/not woman” has been a fairly easy line to draw. But I don’t think “woman/not woman” is the only axis which disadvantages or advantages people when it comes to politics, and so I think AWS are inherently limited.

Nevertheless, while AWS exist, I cannot see a good reason for excluding trans women from them. I’ve seen people sharing this tweet from Paul Embery, arguing that women are now being elbowed out of politics:

https://twitter.com/PaulEmbery/status/951541359944577029

However, I think this is quite disingenuous. From what I have seen of Paul Embery, he too is opposed to identity-based measures and considers class to be something of a neglected issue in politics, so I doubt he was particularly happy with AWS in the first place, although I’m happy to be corrected on this. But also, while trans women and cis women may have very different experiences, a trans woman is definitely not equivalent to a man in a wig in how she is treated by society.

I can anticipate people arguing that maybe a trans woman will have had some advantages earlier in life, from having been perceived as a man. Maybe this is true, maybe this isn’t; I have no direct experience of life as a trans woman. But if a hypothetical trans woman — let’s call her Jenny — had had some advantages earlier in life when people viewed her as a man, maybe Claire, a different hypothetical candidate, has had advantages from being middle-class or able-bodied or white. This is my point; you can’t tot up these things neatly and easily and I don’t think any differences in experience between trans women and cis women are enough to justify leaving them out of an AWS.

I’ve seen a couple of tweets saying that maybe trans women should have separate spaces, but I’m not sure a trans women — only shortlist would a) be workable in practice in terms of numbers b) actually satisfy the people suggesting it, because at least some of them would then argue that cis women were being excluded from politics through being excluded from this shortlist.

Finally, I’m really not sure, as other people have suggested, that men would pretend to be trans women in order to gain access to Labour party AWS; this would take a lot of effort on their part considering that they would probably succeed in politics far more easily as a man and anyway their efforts would also probably be pretty easy to see through.

Basically I don’t think AWS should exist anyway, since I think views and ability are what matter most, but if they are going to exist then I really can’t see why you wouldn’t let trans women on them and I’ve been confused by a lot of the reactions to this issue.