A former Greens member who quit the party over its approach to transgender issues has questioned how a political party can function without debate. But the majority of members say a line has to be drawn.
At 4.14am on April 21, about six hours after the state council of the Victorian Greens formally adopted a new definition of transphobia, Bianca Haven posted a typically provocative tweet: “I have finally won the war on women.”
Their twin proposals, submitted shortly after the 2018 state election, listed examples of trans-exclusionary speech. These included claiming there are two sexes, that trans women are biologically male, that trans issues are an active debate in feminism, that shutting down debate is censorship, that gender identity erases women or that trans women don’t get periods.
A new anti-discrimination provision inserted into the party’s code of conduct defines transphobia as doing something that “harms or seriously risks harming trans people as a group by virtue of being trans” and proscribes as examples: vilifying trans people; discriminating against trans people; attempting to curtail the rights of trans people; intentionally misgendering trans people individually or as a group; denying that non-binary genders exist; promoting the unnecessary prioritisation of sex...
She has twice been cleared by the party’s normal internal disciplinary processes of allegations of transphobia levelled at her by other party members. Her nomination last year for the position of party co-convenor Gale’s original sin, committed in partnership with Nina Vallins, a former Greens member who has since quit the party, was to co-author a rebuttal to Haven and Ramcharan’s 2018 proposal, which they said aimed to shut down debate on a critical issue in feminism and women’s rights. At the time, Gale and Vallins were both members of the party’s state executive.
“The Greens have more members of parliament than they have ever had before but at the same time the administration of the party has, I think, been completely debased. You can’t have a healthy, functioning political party where people can’t debate politics.”
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