This response to the non-apology by Green Party Women on their fb page is by Beatrix Campbell and is bang on, I wonder if GWP will bother to respond?
"The GPW committee response to the convo on this thread is risible: it is more like a Ryanair faux apology to its poor passengers, or the Royal mantra: never explain, never apologiese.This conversation is about many Green women's riposte to the absurd and misoginyst nomenclature 'non male'; We object to the entire premise upon which it is based; we also object to the GPW representation of 'gender'.
Feminism is a politics of resistance to patriarchy, misoginy, sexism and to the ways that sexism articulates with other political and economic systems: slavery, capitalism and now the neo-liberal hegemony.
Feminism is a movement of resistance to the subordination of women. We don't valorise 'woman' as a category, or femininity' as a culture; we engage in feminism not because it privileges 'woman' but because it problematises ‘woman’, ‘man’ and 'gender'. '
No one in this thread who resists the GPW statement is advocating excluding anybody - the only exclusion, censorship, threat and disrespect that has been shown is by the GP cabal that has forced a popular Green candidate to make a public retraction of his contemplation of the gender problematic - he’s a philosopher, he was dong his job! His public humiliation was unforgivable - and that represents feminism critiques of gender/identity and sexual exploitation through prostitution as transPHOBIA and whorePHOBIA.
The only exclusion is perpetrated by those in the GP who represent critique and contemplation as phobia; by some GP equality spokespersons who have used, abusively, terms such as terfs, swerfs, smurfs, whatever;
Several of us have protested against this abusive behaviour - to no avail.
Phrases such as: 'in GPW we respect and support individuals' affirmed gender. Apologies for any confusion’....expose the origin of the confusion: it lies with those in the GP who promote a notion of ‘gender’ that de-politicises it, that reduces identity to consumerism and individualism, and replaces political structures of oppression with a cornucopia of choices; that erases the social and the structural; finally this approach targets feminism - rather than misoginy - as the enemy;
We aren't confused, you are: what on earth does 'individuals' affirmed gender' mean? I ask because I really have no idea. Actually, I have no idea what ‘woman’ means outside the regime of gender: gender is what sex can’t explain: a social relationship;
We are all structured in the gender system, we don’t choose it, but we all navigate our place in it;
Feminism, above all fundamentally challenges the co-ordinates of gender - the notion of ‘individuals’ affirmed gender’ implies its re-instatement and evacuates gender as a political system predicated on the subordination of women.
By the way this does not mean any surrender to the rubbish category ‘non male’.
Feminism is the only politics to have problematised gender and sex, and yet feminists and their allies have become the target of toxic charges of the transphobia/whorephobia, blah blah blah by GP spokespersons.
You will notice that the critique of the GPW statement has not resorted to the lexicon of abuse - a la alleged phobia. All the piety of GPW, and all the identity-affirming in the world, cannot disguise the sheer bad manners and abuse dished out to feminists.
We are not having it. Many women are just wandering away from the Green Party; and many are just embarrassed by all this irrelevance and idiocy.
The GPW committee-speak response to this thread is not a political engagement, it is more like a Ryanair press release, guided by the Royal mantra ‘never apologise, never explain’.
I could go on, and at some point I will - and no doubt so will many of the other participants in this thread - but for now I'll end with this: please desist from responses to us that take the form of a corporate non-apology 'sorry if you were offended....sorry if you were confused'.
I am not offended or confused, but I am disappointed, dispirited, but not at all surprised, by the GPW agenda and its hapless collapse into misoginy."