Leaving the Greens
Councillor Dom Armstrong wrote Tuesday:
It is with great sadness that I tender my resignation to the Green Party.
I have been a member since 2015 and a councillor since May 2019 in Washington/ Sunderland, a role which I will also be giving up.
In that time they accomplished good things.
I joined the Greens, and agreed to stand for public office, simply because I have two daughters. I did hope that through joining the Greens, and fighting climate change, this would be a worthy way to honour them. They didn’t always understand, especially when they were younger, why their Dad was working at nights, or at weekends, or posting leaflets in the snow, or responding to emails during holidays. Thankfully, they do now!
During the last couple of months I have become increasingly uneasy about my party’s stance on women’s rights. I have had discussions on social media with party members and activists, where, because I have politely disagreed, I have been called a transphobe, a homophobe, and worse. I have witnessed female colleagues issued with death threats and threats of rape by trans rights activists, so in comparison, I have only had a small taste of this vile behaviour.
I am also dismayed by the fact that a co chair of our women‘s committee is a biological male, who works for a company (GenderGP) that in 2018 was found guilty of illegally supplying puberty blockers to children as young as ten. The Green Party are not concerned by this, in fact this person holds another FOUR senior party roles, and gloats on social media when some women (who they are meant to represent) feel so uncomfortable about this, they leave the party.
There are many trans extremists who are very active in the party and appear to have the leaderships approval. When an emergency motion was tabled for this weekend’s conference, to discuss the issue of GenderGP’s practises, it was deliberately blocked. There was no discussion. Senior party members indicated that it was a “transphobic” motion, not worthy of debate, and there was filibustering, tactical manouvres, and political deviousness which resulted in another motion being discussed instead. This was a motion meant to discuss the safety of children!
Perhaps even worse than this, when a motion to have women’s sex based rights recognised (the day before International Women’s Day) was put forward, again the Green Party leadership were horrified, how could women dare ask for safe spaces in prisons, or ask for a fair chance in sport? The LGBTIQ+ group declared that there was no historical evidence that women had been oppressed on the basis of their sex. Women are oppressed because they ‘look like women.’ To say otherwise was declared oppressive to trans people, a hate motion, which deserved to be righteously overcome.
What???
The LGBTIQ+ group declared that there was no historical evidence that women had been oppressed on the basis of their sex. Women are oppressed because they ‘look like women.’ To say otherwise was declared oppressive to trans people, a hate motion, which deserved to be righteously overcome.
I don’t have enough swears for that.
It almost feels like I am making this up, I still can’t believe this is the party I’ve given 6 years of my life to. I witnessed appalling behaviour by the most senior people in the party, many of whom I’d admired for years (apart from Jenny Jones, who was magnificent). The dawning of this reality was quite crushing, but sobering too. What’s worse is the fact that many of our senior figures profess to hold the high moral ground on many issues, but in fact they are as bad, if not worse, than our political foes.
I feel that the party’s elite are not willing (or able) to stand up to the bullying, and in this they are complicit. The damage this is doing to the trans community (especially the children) is heartbreaking. And the lack of concern for girls and women is damning. The effects of these doctrines are already being felt; in Brighton, a women’s refuge has been denied further council funding because they insisted on female only safe spaces.
And even in the last 2 days, the party has begun its purge. Senior (mostly, again, female) party members are being harassed, and even suspended, for having the audacity to disagree with the party’s dogma.
I cannot stay in a party that puts ideology before women and children’s safety. I can’t continue to serve as a councillor without the motivation to do so 100%, and in good conscience, take the money that the council pay me, when I know I’ll no longer do the role justice.
How did we get here?
Someone needs to learn some history.
To be oppressed for “looking like a woman” you’d first need some roughly consistent concept of what a woman is though, wouldn’t you?
I mean, we even have concepts of what unicorns, dragons and mermaids look like, and they don’t even exist. Surely we’d have a concept of what half the population has in common?
Not … technically. There’s this philosophical account of meaning called constructivism whereby a term has meaning in virtue of how people (would) use it. For instance, on some metaethical constructivist account, to be “good” means that “most people/a reasonable person (would) call it good”. That is, people’s judging something to be good is constitutive of goodness.
We can (even though we shouldn’t) transfer this concept over to basically anything else. So we could say that people’s judging someone to be/look like a woman is constitutive of woman-ness.
This is a a ridiculous account, of course, but it’s part of the Critical Theory project to reduce all knowledge, even meaning itself, to consensus. You’ve heard people say things are “social constructs”? This is what they mean: a bastardized constructivism taken way outside its proper domain.
I remember the days when women were blamed for ruining the ENVIRONMENT for taking birth control pills and peeing rest hormones that messed up all the life in the water. Not so green to supply hormones for cosmetic purposes.
I have been a supporting member and occasional donor of the Green Party in my country for years, but lately there have been some disturbing signals from that side as well. Or maybe it’s already been going on for a long time, and I just haven’t noticed until now. If the trend continues, I guess I have to leave as well, which really sucks, since – to paraphrase Naomi Klein – if we lose the battle over climate change*, we lose them all (there can be no social justice, for women or any other group, on an uninhabitable planet), and every other party has made it 100% clear that any climate action that has even the remotest chance of actually working is categorically out of the question.
Then again, as I have previously written, expecting our elected politicians to be part of the solution rather than the problem is the one option that can safely be ruled out anyway, so…
*Which only requires the absence of far more radical emission cuts than any major party anywhere in the industrial world is even considering.
@ Nullius, is it possible then that we have TW using “women” in a wholly constructed sense, and women using “women” in a material sense?
Also, if trans think that “woman” can be a social construct, then surely “trans” is a social construct too?
No, no, no, no. Trans is real. It is really real. It is the only thing that is real. Everything else is a social construct, but trans is a really really real thing…
*further pondering*
Of course, if “woman” were a social construct, and could be reworked to meet the “needs” of activists, then why wouldn’t they simply redefine woman, and not bother with this “trans” bit at all?
I mean, I tend to think that social constructs will run aground on the merciless shore that is reality, therefore there’s only so much redefining material reality can take. The fact that TRAs haven’t just recast “woman” as a concept, and have created the “trans” concept instead (while still trying their darndest to redefine woman) kind of suggests/proves that you can only stretch the “woman is a social construct” so far before it snaps.
Arcadia:
The ‘trans’ is just a device to shift the window. The end game is absolutely to redefine ‘woman’. It’s already happening. People are already dropping the ‘trans’ and insisting others do too.
@ latsot, yes, I see that, and I’ve seen demands that the trans part of trans woman be dropped, that anything else was tantamount to saying that you didn’t really think they were women. But that’s not my point.
My point is that all this still rests on reality. The post recently about gender neutral language for OB/GYNs illustrates it: they use all vague language, sure, but it still relies on the population being able to sort themselves prior to showing up. Unless it will be insisted that OB/GYNs also be trained in and provide male-specific healthcare, any visit by a male will only result in a referral to the actual specialist required, which will obviously be very invalidating for the male who thinks of himself as “just another kind of woman”. So all this obfuscation relies on people still knowing what’s true.
We can claim we have redefined woman until the cows come home, but that won’t change the fact that the only place a newborn will spontaneously emerge from the human body is via a vagina. You can want to not know that, but you cannot get an entire population to not know that. If you somehow memory wiped everyone, we would realise and observe that fact quickly. Reality isn’t capable of being fully concealed.
“I cannot stay in a party that puts ideology before women and children’s safety”…
May I suggest that they are not putting ideology before women and children’s safety, they are putting self-serving bullying ahead of women and children’s safety. These people want what they want, and they will do anything to get it, including harming others. That is not ideology, it is merely taking what you want regardless of the effect on others. This sort of thing is doing major damage to the left, and if it is not brought to a stop, it will destroy everything we have fought for over the last century and more.