From New Zealand:

The Green Party has caused outrage among its members by publishing an article criticising the party’s push for trans rights in its official magazine.

The article, written by long-time Green Party member Jill Abigail, appeared in the latest edition of party publication Te Awa and said some “older feminists” within the party were concerned the party was putting gender identity over the rights of biological women.

Abigail was particularly critical of MP Jan Logie’s comments in a previous issue that: “We continue to push for progress on LGBTQI+ freedoms, and resist the backlash that’s trying to undermine our trans and gender diverse whanau and roll back their hard-won rights”.

“I am a lesbian, supposedly under their umbrella, but I am part of the backlash,” Abigail wrote.

She said while trans people were vulnerable and “justly” claiming their right to equal treatment, the free speech of those who opposed “male-bodied trans women” entering “female-only spaces” was being shut down with accusations of hate speech.

There were protests, and the article was taken down after about a week. Women must not say they have a right to women-only toilets.

In a statement, a spokesman for the party said the board had apologised.

“We regret that the article was published without a response or right of reply from the affected community, and that our party policy wasn’t made clear,” he said.

“The Green Party upholds the value of diversity and inclusion and we want to reassure members of this.”

Diversity of what, inclusion of what? Magic words don’t answer all questions. There isn’t an actual need for “diversity” of women in the sense that men get to count as women on the grounds of “diversity.” It’s ok for women to mean just women, women only, literal women, real women, women with women’s bodies. We get to have that. There’s no more need for “diversity” and “inclusion” in the sense of adding men to the category “women” than there is for “diversity” and “inclusion” in the sense of adding white people to the category “black people.”

A long-time member and former candidate for the Green Party, speaking on condition of anonymity, called for the board to resign to allow for fresh elections.

“They were … not sorry, didn’t see a problem, that it would stay up, and felt we were overreacting.”

The member said the inference trans women were not real women was offensive and “tremendously unfair”.

It’s true though. Men are not women. “Trans women” are men who identify as / say they are / live as women, and that’s not the same thing as being women. You can say that’s “offensive” until cows grow testicles, but that won’t make it untrue.

“Trans people already struggle enough with not being able to have gender reassignment surgery without women being scared they’re going to be sexually assaulted by them because they still have a penis. It can’t get more bigoted than that.”

Actually, it can’t get much more dismissive of women and their concerns than to brush off fear of sexual assault by people with penises.

MP Logie took to Facebook, outlining the party’s position amid the criticism.

“We have an urgent human rights challenge to realise the rights of trans and non-binary people,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s in anyway acceptable to suggest those rights threaten anyone else.”

Even though they do? Everyone just has to bury that, because the putative “rights of trans and non-binary people,” meaning the right to say they are what they are not and force everyone else to agree, are infinitely more important than the rights of women?

Why? Why are they? Why do trans women matter more than women?

Because they’re better at bullying, seems to be the only real reason.