September 2018 article by Beatrix Campbell:IN ENGLAND'S GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND
(extract)
"Conducive context
The party should ask itself whether the party’s hard-line pro-trans policies and associated bullying provided what sexual violence scholar Prof Liz Kelly calls a ‘conducive context’ that shielded the Challenors from scrutiny.
It might also ask itself whether it lost its marbles about gender and sexual politics, so much so that this proudly open and democratic party sometimes behaved like the Inquisition, hunting and harassing trans heretics and feminists.
Lesbian activist Olivia Palmer has been expelled for opposing the mantra ‘trans women are women’. The Green Party has forced luminaries Rupert Read and Jenny Jones to publically recant their scepticism. Aimee Challenor tried take legal action to silence Green Party activist Any Healey, and members are wondering who in the leadership supported Aimee Challenor’s legal action to silence him – he launched Gender Critical Greens, a feminist resource, and insisted on identifying Challenor as a man. The legal action against Healey is still unresolved. Healey was not allowed to address the party conference, whilst David Challenor was given a platform to propose motions despite his impending trial on the most serious child sexual abuse charges.
Aimee and David Challenor mobilised Twitter widgets to block ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’ - last year Aimee Challenor proclaimed the campaign’s success in blocking 50,000 people deemed ‘terfs’ and bigots, and getting one vocal feminist transsexual, Miranda Yardley, being bannedfrom Twitter for life.
When Miranda Yardley was invited to address North Surrey Green Party, they were forced to disinvite Yardley and then became the subject of a ‘transphobia’ complaint themselves. The Green Party executive didn’t come out against against ‘terfblocking’. The party’s universally-respected leader Caroline Lucas hated it, but described herself as powerless to resist it. I myself complained to a senior Green about terf-blockingand others did, too. Apparently no action was taken. Now, following the Challenor debacle, Lucas herself has been ‘terf-blocked’.
Other organisations – from the Girl Guides to the Lib-dems and the Trades Union Congress - should not be smug about the Greens’ crisis: they’ve tolerated a trans modus operandi and ideology that is bulwarked by claims that to debate its hypotheses – including the mantra ‘a transwoman is a woman…is a woman’ - is to eliminate trans people. Apparently debate is death.
The Working Class Movement Library in Manchester was aghast to find itself targeted by a trans campaign to attack its funding. Gay organisations, too, have been blasted by trans harassment: Manchester’s Queer Up North Festival Organiser, Jonathan Best, chronicles his grim experience.
A closed Facebook group was promoted to name and shame academics deemed transphobic, by Goldsmiths University trans researcher Natacha Kennedy. Kennedy is also Goldsmiths’ Mark Hellen – they are one person, two personas. They appeared as ‘joint’ authors of a paper on ‘transgender children’:
Sussex University philosophy professor Kathleen Stock became a cause celebre when she was pilloried for urging philosophers to engage in the gender debates swirling in social media. She was condemned as transphobic by the students union but in July the university’s vice chancellor Adam Tickell ventured where the Green Party would not tread by affirming both trans people’s human rights and academic freedom, ‘I hold a deep rooted concern,’ he wrote, ‘about the future of our democratic society if we silence the views of people we don’t agree with.’
Girl Guide leaders who opposed the Guides’ imposition of policy declaring that boys transitioning to girlhood can be Girl Guides have been ‘sacked’ and their groups disbanded.
Nothing is real
The Challenor case is an arrow to the heart of Britain’s twisted sexual politics. Already gay activists are joining feminists in saying they are sickof the narcissism and misogyny of some trans activists, and gay people are increasingly alienated by the seemingly endless expansion of categories attached to ‘gay and lesbian’ that have nothing to do with sexual orientation.
The Liberal-Democrats, the Tories and Labour, unions, gay organisations and mass media commentators across the political spectrum should all start asking how they fell for a folly that is not sustained by science, that isn’t inscribed in human rights law and doesn’t enjoy consensus among trans women and trans-sexuals, and certainly not among maybe most women.
The dogma has been promoted as a new civil rights frontier; it is fortified by cultish religiosity, by no-platforming, bullying, what can only be called blacklisting of dissenting voices deemed ‘terfs’ and ‘bigots’ on the wrong side of history, and by the resort to complaints procedures and ‘administrative methods’ to quell debate.
The mantra ‘There is no debate – a transwoman is a woman!’ is recited not only in the Green Party but across the political firmament." (continues)
www.byline.com/column/85/article/2300