The Green Party of England & Wales was founded in 1973 as the PEOPLE Party, and then the Ecology Party. It became the Green Party in 1985. It was focused on the well-being of the environment and people. The party was founded on a clear recognition that all things are connected, for example, human health, biodiversity, democracy and the economy are all interconnected in a systemic web we call society.
The Green Party prioritised a scientific approach to gathering information and building knowledge to enable the development of policies through scientifically informed debate.
The Green Party core values, last updated in January 2024 include Point 4:
“The Earth’s physical resources are finite. We threaten our future if we try to live beyond those means, so we must build a sustainable society that guarantees our long-term future.”
Objectively, there is an understanding that boundaries exist in nature and we cannot go outside of them.
The Green Party’s ecological roots persist with respect to issues concerning the climate and nature crisis, but there has been an increasing tension between what has become the hyper-individualist liberal faction, which is sometimes referred to as those who subscribe to identity politics, and those who perceive humans as social animals who develop in relation to other human beings while also being a part of nature and subject to the same boundaries which affect all living organisms.
Identity politics embraces the neoliberal ideal of individuals having no limits to what they can achieve or aspire to. For several decades people have been paying for surgeries to alter their appearance, to appear younger, for example. More recently, particularly in countries with privatised health services, some people have been paying for transgender surgeries.
The 2024 Green Party manifesto states in its introduction that:
“As a political party, we believe in offering hope. And we believe in following the science and speaking the truth, too.”
And yet in 2016 at the party’s Autumn conference, a motion was passed stating that trans women are women and trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid.
There is no scientific basis for the claim that people can change their sex, on a variable basis, as in non-binary, or a permanent basis, as transitioning suggests. There is no scientific basis for the claim that sex is a spectrum. The attempt to argue that the existence of differences in sexual development is evidence of a spectrum is erroneous. Differences in sexual development, while naturally occurring, are not proof that there are more than two sexes. People born with DSD are ultimately identified as male or female according to their genetic markers.
The Green Party has broken away from science and from speaking the truth by supporting gender identity ideology.