The Victorian Greens, and the party nationally, is heading for either a new round of civil war or a wave of expulsions today as leadership awaits the results of recent elections to the state council.
The elections have been a staging ground for the continuing battle between one “gender” group arguing for a restriction on internal debate around trans, gender and identity issues, and another “debate” group arguing for a more pluralist framework in which different positions on the question of identity can be debated.
The “gender” group wants, and has recently got, the state party to commit completely to the total “gender affirmation” model — you is whatever you say you is — and to explicitly ban, and label as transphobic, any internal debate that questions whether categorisation by embodied sex (in state institutions such as hospitals or prisons, for example) should play a role in a more complex modelling of sex and gender in social life.
With this more restrictive model recently voted up as party policy, the “gender” group is gunning for the remnants of the “debate” group (who call themselves the “materialists” and are called TERFs by their opponents), including high-profile Greens such as Linda Gale and Melbourne City Councillor Rohan Leppert.
The composition of the state council, to be determined today for a meeting on the weekend, will decide the future direction of the party. Eight of the 15 positions are up for grabs, with the “debate” group hoping to gain six. However, the council will meet on Sunday, in its old constellation, in which the “gender’ faction has a supermajority, and a free hand to make expulsions.
“I fully expect to be expelled eventually,” one activist told me. “Part of me is almost looking forward to it; I need the rest. I’ve done nothing but this stuff for the past 18 months. On the other hand, I’ll be shattered if it happens.”
The “gender” group, whose most visible public face is the activist Bianca Haven, has prospered with the support of state Greens Leader Samantha Ratnam and Senator Janet Rice. Initially a younger insurgent group, it had been recruiting hard — “recruiting? It’s a stack!”, said the same Green activist — on this issue, gaining as many as 400 members for the party.
The “debate” group has been furiously trying to get existing members of a more mainstream disposition to vote in the state council elections, to have lapsed members revive their membership, in order to head off the rise of the new faction.
The war has spilled out beyond party confines and into Nine media, with duelling pieces by Chip Le Grand — who recently wrote a sympathetic piece on Melbourne University philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, self-described as a “gender-critical” feminist and recently targeted as a “transphobe” by a student campaign — and Broede Carmody, who adopted the standard usage of “TERF” to describe the arguments of the “debate” group.
Arguments about the coverage of these interrelated matters are said to have raged across The Age and been fought out in the house committee of the largely pro-“gender” group of journalists. As a compromise, Le Grand and Carmody were yoked to write a piece covering the introduction of the speech-restrictive guidelines.
The debate has also raged across the party nationally, with veteran activists targeted for expulsion in other states.
In Queensland, perhaps the most fervently “genderist” of all branches, Drew Hutton — a founder of the branch, and then of Lock the Gate — is said to have been the subject of an internal inquiry lasting more than a year.
During the recent bitter contest to remove the leader of the materialist/debate group, Gale, from the convenor position, the Queensland branch issued a condemnation of the Victorian branch for its alleged transphobia.
A number of Victorian Greens have formed a branch of the Queensland party, and tried to register as affiliated to that state branch rather than Victoria’s. The People’s Front of Judea is apparently not answering their calls.
What effect a mass expulsion would have on the Greens’ wider electoral chances remains to be seen. Their vote is reasonably solid, and probably highly pro-gender in the inner-city strongholds, with other supporters — the migrant groups that support federal Greens Leader Adam Bandt, for example — turning a blind eye to the shenanigans. Bandt and his office have remained resolutely separated from involvement in the stoush.
However, it seems reasonable to say that the “teal” space the Greens might once have seen as a place to expand, as inroads into working-class communities stalled, has now itself stalled. The party’s turnover has been substantial, especially during the pandemic, when Zoom meetings tended to favour the hyperdigital younger generation.
“Older members now just feel alien in these meetings, which have never gone back to being live,” one branch member from the hyper-hip Brunswick area said. “I’m sticking it out, but I really get the sense I’m not wanted in there.”
There is talk of forming a network or organisation of sorts if there is a mass expulsion; there is also a weariness about organisation and starting again.
“Part of me wants to save this party,” another targeted person said. “But I also think, let them have it, and see what happens. They’ll divide against themselves. Let’s see what phoenix rises from the ashes.”
All of which is to affirm again that it’s not easy being… oh you’ve heard it?
The Greens have a limited opportunity to become an actual Party with a chance to take over the space vacated by Labor…………….
……..so naturally, their preference is to self-destruct by preoccupying themselves with issues that affect less than 1% of the population.
Do yourselves (and us) a favour, and CONCENTRATE ON THE MAIN GAME.
yes siree bob – where are the real people
The Greens should be the ones leading the charge on challenging the environmentally destructive consequences of extreme migration but would rather destroy themselves over acronyms.
An overheated planet will make no distinction between a transphobe and a transphile…
Neither will an incoming ICBM
Neither does the Reserve Bank when it decrees a couple of hundred thousand people need to lose their jobs to “reduce inflation”
Neither do the Landlord Party of Australia, or the current government, the Australian Landlord Party when they agree that a couple of million non-landlords should spend more time outside…
None of this is to say that people who don’t fit the traditional gender designation are unworthy of our respect or consideration, but one is left scratching one’s head a bit to discover this is the issue that the Australian Greens have chosen to die in a ditch over.
Yes indeed. Keeping workers pitted against one another is the old game. Economic relations are the first priority. Workers getting a fair deal, the winding back of 40 + years or that horrible Neoliberalism.
https://twitter.com/JohnBB40921542/status/1648077746504110080/photo/1
This is horrible to read. Why do the Greens constantly become their own send-up? You don’t need Sky After Dark to rubbish them, they’re quite capable of doing the job themselves.
remember this is one angle on a acoop perhaps
Every time I start thinking that the Left should ditch the ALP for the Greens, something like this comes up.
could be a beat up however Val might be behind it sadly ive lost all respect for old comrade
still – if comes down to accepting the idea of “you is whatever you say you is” with all the mess it possibly entails … or accepting the current milquetoast (at best) offerings re saving humanity from climate catastrophe* … then, i’ll stick to the Greens
*plus of course: income inequality, housing, education, health, defence etc
My concern is not so much with their policies – most of which I agree with – but with their ability to deliver on those policies if they are ever elected to majority government.
Why ?
Except the ALP in Victoria support the same shutting down of free speech on this issue, and are the ones who introduced self-ID legislation in Victoria.
Seriously! The neo-liberalisation of “left” politics continues.
While I don’t agree with the Crikey branch of Rotary that will likely be out the force in these comments that all gender non-standard viewpoints are fatuous fairy dust, the totalitarian tendency of the trans orthodoxy is increasingly alarming and unhinged.
When you’ve got beefy blokes who say they’re women abusing radical lesbian feminists for being transphobic … it starts to look a bit like good old-fashioned misogyny. I realise that’s not what’s happening here, but when increasing numbers of women, and not just repressed, ultra-traditional women, but thoughtful, committed feminists, are questioning the trans orthodoxy and when repressed, ultra-traditional women are (in some cases) strongly pro-trans, because they’re prefer their child was straight and trapped in the wrong body, as opposed to queer, … well, there’s plenty to talk about!
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the day that I can freely define my own gender without any stigma whatsoever and who cares if the rivers are dry, the forests are burnt and the rich are arming themselves against the rest of us poor mugs.
first world problems ; me too is great how ever whilst the so called free thinkers are claiming moral highground the internet is full of vile exploitation and power vested into fewer hands – where is the outrage by those who are appropriating women over abortion rights and ageism ?
oh thats right she can bear the children of the well heeled rich boys and then bear the babies and be told its immoral for her to have money or ownership of her womb- women
Misogyny is precisely what’s happening here.
As you can read on their website, they just defined transphobia to include “promoting the unnecessary prioritisation of sex characteristics above gender”. If that radical lesbian feminist states the bleeding obvious that a radical lesbian feminist prefers a female sex partner she can be accused of misconduct and needs to convince a tribunal that her prioritisation of lady parts was “necessary”, a term they didn’t take the time to define, or be burned at the stake.
That’s good old-fashioned misogyny.