Green Party - can it be led to see sense on its policies towards women

[User983590521]

Emma Bateman is the co chair of Green Party Women, and she is challenging the Green Party to stand up for sense, science and women's sex based rights.
Emma is digging in for her legal case.

A short video of Emma (2 mins) :

youtu.be/5aMsEmDXK0c .

Thanks Zombie! I'm the last on your list.

In Scotland the leadership are clear that only gender believers are welcome in the party.

@Reluctantadult

Thanks Zombie! I'm the last on your list.

Hooray!

It's quite a large subject encompassing many issues.

I've not read it, but lots of people recommend Helen Joyce's book 'trans'. There's also Kathleen Stock's 'Material Girls'.

Some other suggestions here:

sex-matters.org/bookshelf/

The problem in a nutshell is that women, as a 'minority' in the sense that they face structural inequalities, have certain protections in law. These are enshrined in the Equality Act. (Nine protected characteristics; sex is one).

The 'Gender Recognition Act' was introduced subsequently and suggests that males can effectively become female. This is where the 'transwomen are women' slogan comes into play.

Feminists believe that allowing males to identify into femalehood risks sweeping away women's rights that are protected in law.

If anyone can 'identify' as a woman, and there is no clear definition of woman, then how can we protect our rights?

This can be illustrated by situations like the males identifying as women to get the places reserved for women in affirmative action:

www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/22/mexico-elections-fake-transgender-candidates-disqualified

There are also some risks presented by males being increasingly able to access female spaces.

For example, a male identified as a female and was placed on a female ward in hospital. He raped another patient, who was then told by the NHS that the rape couldn't have happened because 'there were no men present'.

Males are being place in women's prisons. There have been sexual assaults by males in women's prisons.

Most feminists really don't care how anyone 'identifies', so long as they don't impinge on women's rights to privacy, dignity, and equity.

Re the Green Party: at the recent conference a motion was proposed to expel any members who had signed the declaration on women's sex based rights. You can read it for yourself and judge for yourself whether you think this is a reasonable suggestion:

'On the re-affirmation of women’s sex-based rights, including women’s rights to physical and reproductive integrity, and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and girls that result from the replacement of the category of sex with that of ‘gender identity’, and from ‘surrogate’ motherhood and related practices.'

womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/

I think at base the issue is whether you think it's acceptable that males can 'identify' as females.

Trans rights supporters often say that any male who 'feels' like a woman is de facto a woman. Feminists say that this presents issues.

I'm told that Emma needs carrots for her allotment.

You can read about it in this tweet.
twitter.com/EmmaBatemanGPW/status/1500457543222583305

Or check out Emma Bateman crowdjustice.

Emma needs all the help she can get.

@DomesticatedZombie

Mangy I do agree - I think there need to be far more robust conversations about things like nuclear power, for example.

Yes.

They've also changed their focus politically to a much more typical big state socialist kind of politics, whereas when they started they drew inspiration from thinkers like E.R. Schumacher. One issue that stood out for me was that unlike the socialists, our Greens didn't have a reflexive call for state run/paid daycare - they were more inclined to ask, why do both parents find they need to work? Which actually fits in with environmental concerns as well, because it relates to how we see productivity in the economy.

If you said anything like that now they'd look at you as if you were crazy, they wouldn't understand the objection. There's not only a lack of serious science, there's no deep look at the social structures that are intertwined with over-consumption. They are much too caught up in identity politics as the frame for environmental issues for all that.

Yes, the pushing of 'childcare' as any kind of a solution for our 'development' obsessed social structures is a swerve that misses the point.

The Greens will only ever be a pressure group, really, so they are free to explore more radical policies to at least act as a counter balance to rampant neo-liberal ideology.

• while I disagree with much of what 'Deep Green Resistance' say, I find them really useful as exactly that - a group that continues to question the dominant narratives, suggest radical alternatives, keep rattling the cages of those in power.