Deciding who to vote for is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone who is concerned about both the climate and ecological emergency and the erosion of sex-based rights. Mainstream political parties might have policies which address one or the other of those concerns, but few, if any, address both. This will almost certainly be the case with the UK general election that is expected to be called next year. And I imagine it will be the case in next year’s US presidential election, and elsewhere where citizens are allowed to elect their governments.
This has come to a head for me choosing who to vote for in next week’s local elections in England. Although most of the contentious policies related to climate change and sex-based rights are determined nationally, many are implemented locally - active travel plans, for example, or sex education in schools.
Slogans have consequences
One of my first exchanges on twitter about ‘gender’ was in the summer of 2020, with Molly Scott Cato. She had, before Brexit, been my Green MEP in the European parliament, and a politician for whom I had a lot of respect. (She’s now the England and Wales Green Party’s spokesperson on finance and the economy).
It was widely believed at the time that if MSC was elected to an executive position within the Green Party, she would bring a more conciliatory tone to its fractious internal debates about sex and ‘gender’. But our twitter exchange was sparked by a tweet in which she criticised Keir Starmer for being lukewarm on ‘trans rights’. (In the Labour Party leadership election earlier in 2020 Starmer had supported a 10 point pledge put out by a group called LGBT+ Labour. Unlike the other leadership candidates, though, he had not endorsed another group called the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights, who had demanded the expulsion of party members who supported what they called ‘trans exclusionist’ groups - groups that defended women’s rights (particularly Women’s Place UK) or lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights (LGB Alliance.)
To make it clear where she stood, MSC trotted out a familiar mantra - trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary gender identities are valid. I found this strange, as those very same words were in one of the LGBT+ Labour pledges, the pledges which Keir Starmer had signed up to. But I was more concerned with their support for a nonsensical but pernicious slogan, and the consequences of adopting it, than with trying to understand what the difference between them might be.
In my response to MSC’s tweet, I explained that I had long been a Green voter, but that I could no longer vote for a party that denied biological reality and allowed women’s rights to be eroded. Her reply was dismissive. She didn’t believe me. She explained that no-one agrees with all of a political party’s polices, so what we have to do is accept that we will disagree over some issues and vote for the party that most represents our values. I understood her general point about choosing which party to vote for, but was astounded by her disbelief that someone might feel strongly enough about women’s rights to change the way they voted.
I suspect that if the Green Party was, hypothetically, taken over by a group that denied the existence of climate change, MSC might understand that I (and she) could no longer vote for It. Clearly she did not feel the same way about what had actually happened in her own party in relation to ‘gender’ - its takeover by a group that denied the existence of biological reality. Yet by acceding to the demands of that group, the Green Party is not only erasing the rights of women and children, it is normalising body dissociation and endorsing a sustained attack on the very nature of humanity as a sexually dimorphic species, rooted in the biosphere.
Political ‘tribes’
MSC’s response got me thinking about what had influenced my vote in past elections, and what had changed. If I remember correctly, I consistently voted Labour in elections from 1966 until 1979. I didn’t agree with many of its policies, particularly its support for polluting industries and for nuclear weapons. But I guess I voted Labour because it represented my values more than the alternatives. In the1983 General Election I voted for the Ecology Party, mainly because I was inspired by the values around nature and peace that its election manifesto espoused. I still have a copy of that manifesto. It reads very differently from the policy pronouncements now put out by its successors, the Green Parties of England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland:
“We bow down before materialistic and ‘rational’ values, and correspondingly devalue the natural, the spiritual and the emotional…..Consider again the women at Greenham Common (the 1980s peace camp) : reasserting the importance of personal growth, celebrating the sacredness of the Earth, and whilst rediscovering the vital connections between the two, speaking with a power that is greater than their own…….It is the wisdom of ecology that can make us whole again, restoring the balance between the logical and the natural, between ourselves and others, between humanity and the planet Earth”
(Ecology Party, politics for life, 1983 election manifesto)
The Ecology Party gained no Members of Parliament in the 1983 election, and achieved only 0.2% of the votes. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party won a landslide victory, which heralded the decimation of the UK’s foundational economy (particularly social housing), the harmful consequences of which remain to this day.
I continued to vote for the Green Party, which became three different national Green Parties in 1990. These parties now have much more support than its predecessor ever did. Thanks to the UK’s undemocratic first past the post electoral system they have only one MP, but they have managed to push climate change up the political agenda, and influence other parties to become more ‘green’ (albeit of a bright rather than a deep hue). The Green Parties’ record on child sexual abuse and synthetic sex identities has, however, become increasingly troubling. The Scottish party is in the ruling coalition that runs the devolved government, and it was instrumental in introducing divisive (and now contested in UK courts) legislation which would allow ‘gender’ self-identification at 16. The England and Wales Party has been supportive of paedophiles holding positions of power within the party, it has suspended whistleblowers who have drawn attention to this, and it is now expelling members for daring to raise concerns about ‘gender’ self-identification and the erosion of women’s rights. Each year activists ensure that the party amplifies its promotion of synthetic sex identities - a national conference this March passed a motion to provide NHS funding for expansion of the fertility industry, including free IVF treatment and free cryopreservation of sperm, oocytes, and embryos. This to give people rendered infertile by cross-sex hormones or ‘gender affirming’ surgery the ability to colonise a woman’s body and acquire children who are genetically related to them, a recent market development that I described, here, as transurrogacy.
Red lines
Next week, on 4 May, elections will be held for many local authorities in England, including mine. I want to vote, but I can no longer vote for my ‘tribe’ - the Green Party has crossed a red line for me with its increasingly enthusiastic promotion of synthetic sex identities. Not knowing who I might vote for, I’ve had to work out what this red line is that I feel that the Green Party has crossed, and which stops me voting for it. I don’t think it is ‘just’ that it is supporting an industry that promotes body dissociation, and harms women, gays, and children. The more I think about it, the clearer it seems that my red line is that its policies on ‘gender’ and surrogacy would propel humanity in a direction that further disconnects us from nature - a disconnect that, if unchecked, would eventually end up with individuals who are either augmented or mutilated, and a species that is to some degree transhuman. Surrogacy, with or without its connection to synthetic sex identities, is an integral part of this - it depends on body dissociation, it reduces the creation of new life to a commercial transaction, it panders to the genetic entitlement of the rich, it commodifies women’s bodies, and it paves the way for artificial reproduction.
As Jennifer Bilek explains, “the corporate state is deconstructing sex as a step towards alienating us from our humanity.” We’re not there yet, but if this process continues, we will have passed a point of no return.
Irreversilbility is what links developments paving the way for transhumanism with my other red line, intensifying the climate and ecological emergency. In each case, once a certain line is passed there may be no going back. A politics that does not address this is not just posing a political choice with which one may or may not agree, it is facilitating an existential threat. (If I knew more about it, I might add Generative AI as a third red line - irreversibility and existential threat again.)
My two red lines are linked in other ways, too. Failure to acknowledge the threat of climate change, and failure to acknowledge the threat of ‘genderism’, are both based on a denial of material reality. So when the leaders of the Green Party deny biological reality, voters may understandably question the good faith of their statements about climate reality. And when activists believe that anyone can create a new identity for themselves, freed from their biology, it’s not a huge leap before they can start believing that we as a species can be freed from the constraints of nature. ‘It’s no accident’, as Marxists used to say, that the billionaires who promote transhumanism believe it may enable them to live forever, in a virtual ‘reality’ whose only link to material reality would be the energy that would be needed to keep their frozen bodies and/or their digital brains ‘alive’.
The other parties
None of the main parties in England now deny the reality of climate change, and all have policies which they claim will bring about decarbonisation. Only the Green Party, though, has an economic policy that prioritises climate stability and social justice over GDP growth, and Molly Scott Cato would almost certainly be a better Chancellor of the Exchequer than either Jeremy Hunt (Conservative) or Rachel Reeves (Labour). Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all have fairly ambitious net zero targets, but with few plans for achieving them, other than decarbonising electricity supply in ways that contribute to ecological breakdown. They are committed to GDP growth as a priority, which is not an effective way to tackle the climate emergency, and no way at all to tackle biodiversity loss and the ecological emergency.
All these political parties are heavily implicated in crossing my other red line, synthetic sex identities. Ferring, the pharmaceutical firm that supplies puberty blockers to the NHS Gender Identity Service (GIDS), is a major funder of the Liberal Democrats, and the Lib Dems compete with the Greens with who can be the most enthusiastic ‘trans ally’. At its March conference, activists called for anyone with gender critical views to leave the party.
Labour has, until recently, been just as bad. During her unsuccessful campaign to be party leader in 2020, Lisa Nandy insisted, to applause from the audience, that a man who raped a child and then self-identified as a woman should be housed in a women’s prison. Keir Starmer has recently indicated that he no longer wants trans rights to override women’s rights. The devil will be the detail though, and Starmer’s latest biology-denying suggestion that “99.9% of women don’t have a penis” (ie that 0.1% do) hardly inspires confidence. Sex-based protections don’t count for much if members of the sex you want to be protected from can redefine the word sex to include themselves in the protected category.
The Conservatives look as though they may come out more strongly against self-identification of sex at the next general election. But it was Conservative MPs Maria Miller and Justine Greening, and Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who in 2016/17 proposed changing the Gender Recognition Act to allow self-identification, and it has been on the Conservatives’ watch that institutions like the NHS, police, schools etc have been captured by gender ideology. It is hard to see their belated apparent change of heart as anything other than a cynical vote catching ploy that could be reversed if they continued as the government.
In relation to surrogacy, the Law Commissions have recently proposed changes which would greatly expand the industry, and further erode the rights of mothers. It remains to be seen which, if any, of the political parties will resist this development, or if any will be open to calls for surrogacy to be outlawed (as is the case in many European countries).
Who to vote for?
In next week’s local election, independents not bound by party discipline will be standing, and it looks like I will be able to vote for a couple of them with a clear conscience in my local area.
As for the next general election, probably in Autumn 2024, there may be alternatives to consider, if they have candidates standing in my constituency. There are two small political parties, that I didn’t realise were still in existence, which might be worth checking out. The SDP (Social Democrat Party) has a policy on sex-based rights which supports segregation by sex in sport, prisons, and women’s refuges (but it is let down on climate by extremely weak policies on energy and the environment).The CPB (Communist Party of Britain) has issued a statement defending sex-based rights,. It also has a briefing on climate change which criticises the ineffectiveness of current government policy (though it doesn’t give much indication of what it would put in its place).
Perhaps the most intriguing development is the anticipated launch later this year of a new political party, Party Of Women. It appears that this will be campaigning explicitly for women’s rights, including abolition of the Gender Recognition Act (which created the legal fiction of allowing men to be treated as if they were women), and that it will have candidates standing in many constituencies. It is unlikely to be able to gain any MPs. But its presence could at least ensure that in election debates the main parties will have to address the concerns it raises (in a similar way that the Green Party’s presence in earlier elections made the main parties take some account of concerns about climate change).
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There is I believe a Workers' Party and the CPGB-ML has taking a most firm stance against "transgender" nonsense. However, in a bourgeois "democracy" (democracy for the slave owner), math is the deciding factor of whatever ruling class policy will be put into motion. And when the point arrives that, say, the CPGB-ML did get enough seats to change policy for the people, then the real fascism behind the curtain with bare its teeth and the policy the ruling class wants will STILL be put into place. In the US this is routinely done using the courts, but if that were to fail, the party of the prole would be immediately outlawed in your country---it has been outlawed with criminal penalty as well as civil sanction in the US for many decades now. It is unfortunate so many are in denial about the TRUE nature of capitalist states. Hopefully some will learn and grow over the tranny issue, but I am NOT seeing it. They still cling to their ignorance of political economy and history with vicious arrogance. There's no such thing as RIGHTS under capitalist states, there are only bourgeois privileges bestowed upon useful groups to enrich our masters and repress the great unwashed masses. Quite simple and visible if one chooses to OBSERVE.
Well, there are no choices if one wants change. Voting in a "bourgeois" democracy is democracy for our ruling class who are imposing all this idiocy upon the masses. We the people have no democracy. Look at France with millions in the street while their state IMPOSED raising retirement no matter what the people wanted. Capitalist parties in a capitalist system are the root cause of ALL collective problems for the masses and voting within a superstructure designed to maintain their rule at all costs is simply never going to work. Marx and Engels wrote about the solution to the ruling class problem. And they were dead on in their analysis. I was sent to jail over "woke" repression while we are talking about IDENTITIES which are created by the ruling class as another form of REPRESSION to easily wielded by the "legal" system and the dispatch of the armed men of the state. I actually got quite acquainted with Das Kapital while in the US slammer. I suggest others get busy acquainting themselves.