Veering

Feminism? Meh. Anti-racism? Bleh. Internationalism/multiculturalism? Yawn.

The Green Party=The Trans Party.

The Green party is veering away from its founding culture towards a more leftwing authoritarianism, its former health spokesperson has claimed.

Dr Pallavi Devulapalli said trans rights had become an obvious totem in the new climate, and accused the party of trying to purge anyone with gender-critical views.

Devulapalli, a GP and member of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council, was expelled from the party for a rules breach that she has said was due to her beliefs on gender. Her expulsion this month, she said, has exposed a rift in the party’s leadership on transgender issues that threatens to widen during this summer’s leadership election.

But the rift or rifts have been happening for several years.

The party’s current co-leader Adrian Ramsay, who has argued that members should not be thrown out for saying trans women are not women, is pressing internally for Devulapalli’s expulsion to be reviewed.

Members should not be thrown out or ostracized or yelled at or punished in any other way for knowing that men are not women.

Devulapalli was suspended last September, three months after she failed to back the party’s manifesto policy on the right of self-identification for trans people during a hustings event. Last week she was informed she had been expelled from the party after attending what Devulapalli said she thought was a social gathering, but which a disciplinary panel deemed was an official party event from which she was banned because of her suspension.

Yeah great. They ostracize her, then she accidentally gets near some of them, so they kick her out. Lovely people; so very green.

Devulapalli is now one of 25 “Greens in Exile” – former party members who have been suspended or expelled largely for their gender critical views. Last year a court found the party had removed Dr Shahrar Ali as a party spokesperson in a procedurally unfair way that discriminated against him because of his gender critical belief. In 2021, Ali’s position as spokesperson is understood to have prompted Siân Berry, now an MP, to quit as co-leader.

Devulapalli said the party’s belief that trans women are women was “peddling a falsehood”, adding: “It denies science and denies reality and alienates the Greens from the vast majority of voters who know the truth when they see it.”

Quite so. It’s a fantasy, a fiction, a story, and grownup political parties should not be imposing fictions on its members.

Following April’s supreme court ruling that a “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman, the Greens’ policy has come under strain. In interviews since, Ramsay, who is standing again as co-leader with fellow MP Ellie Chowns, has refused to commit to an answer, but Carla Denyer, who is standing down as co-leader, has said that “trans women are women [and] trans men are men”. Zack Polanski, a leadership challenger, is campaigning on the slogan “trans rights are human rights”.

But of course trans women are not women, which is why they’re called trans women. That’s the whole point. It’s not just a descriptor, like “friendly” or “wise” or “decent”; it’s a negation. Trans women=men who claim/pretend to be women. It’s fatuous for adults to keep saying pretend women are women.

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