the flimsy evidence in my Green Party case

The Green Party suspended my membership for two years, 2021 to 2023, for alleged transphobia and anti-semitism. All the charges were dismissed in April 2023. I have blogged about this already: about the result at vindicated-at-last-green-party and about the process up to the hearing of the complaint at Cancel-culture-Green-Party.

The suspension was a ‘no-fault suspension’, which meant that nobody ever substantiated any claim that I had broken any Green Party rule or code of conduct. They did not have to. The complainant merely had to allege that I was a danger to them or a risk to the party's reputation. The party accepted the allegation without more This is because its central apparatus has been captured by gender ideology extremists. In my case that is the Disciplinary Committee along with Green Party Regional Council (GPRC), which decides ‘no-fault suspension’ cases.

My case illustrates what many gender-critical activists already know: when gender ideology extremists have captured the organisation you are in, the flimsiest reasons are all they need to punish critics and often, as here, the process is the punishment.

I am posting this today to provide full details for the first time of the flimsy charges against me. Here are the six screenshots that were provided in evidence by the complainant.

The complaint was not just about transphobia. It also alleged anti-semitism, which was due to the fact that I had referred to Jennifer Bilek who had written about the transgender policies of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF):

‘Soros’ Open Society Foundation is working to construct, along with Arcus and TGEU, the idea that children being medicalized for life is just another way to be human.  This new way to be human, for children being funneled into youth “gender clinics,” involves dangerous drugs and medical procedures that assist them in hiding the fact they are either biologically male or female.’ 

The first screenshot is about the way that allegations of anti-semitism are misused to target people for wrongthink. It was a delicious irony of the complaint that the complainant was doing the very thing that my post is drawing attention to.

The second screenshot relates to a suggestion by Bilek in her 11thhourblog that there may be a cultural link between Judaism and transhumanism. I was interested because I was trying to understand how, as a society, we seem to be moving along the 'natural/artificial' spectrum away from nature and towards technology. 

To digress on this point, I see the Green Party becoming more 'bright green', which means techno-fixes for environmental problems, rather than 'deep green', which means back-to-nature solutions to those problems. But, back to the question of links between culture and transhumanism, where, I wondered, did the belief come from that people can change sex or gender by taking cross-sex hormones for life? Was there a link between the concepts of the body and the soul within the Abrahamic faiths that could explain this new fixation on changing one's body in line with the concept of one's gendered soul. 

In the end, it seemed to me that the main thing linking the funders of transhumanism was that they were mega-rich white men with interests in pharmaceuticals and technology. Still, it had seemed worth discussing in Green Spaces, as that was what the discussion forum was for. Here is the second screenshot:

The next two screenshots were about my 'troll'. 

and

This was someone who had been making repeated, provocative, insulting responses to my posts and other people’s. That is the common understanding on social media of the meaning of the word ‘troll’. I did not name the troll.

Remember that the conditions for imposing a no-fault suspension are that a member's act poses a danger to someone in the party or a risk to the party's reputation. It is hard to see how any of the four screenshots so far could pose a danger to anyone in the party or a risk to the party's reputation. I had named no one and my comments were confined to a party members’ forum that was closed to the outside world.

The final two screenshots were of things I had done in the public domain, namely Twitter: 

and

They were retweets and not even my own tweets and they were fairly tame in the context of the ‘debate’ that goes on in the twenty-first century’s ‘public square’, namely Twitter. Those retweets and the four comments in Green Spaces were the sum total of the evidence against me.

Normally the Disciplinary Committee (DC) appoints investigators to interview the complainant and respondent and then submit a report to DC to summarise their positions. In my case, however, DC dispensed with the usual investigation process and heard my case based simply on the complaint form, the six screenshots and my defence. 

They had never really needed an investigation in the first place because the complaint was so thin and flimsy. But by following the usual investigation process, they dragged out the case for two years. This was mainly because my investigator took nearly a year to start his investigation and then never finished it. Allegedly he went off sick although that didn't stop him from participating in other DC cases during the time when he was supposed to be too sick to finish my report.

As I said in my blog in April about my hearing, it was a frivolous and vexatious complaint. That could have been spotted from day one, back in February 2021, by anyone with a common-sense approach to triaging complaints. It should have been thrown out there and then because there was no case to answer. But the Green Party Representative Council and DC played along with the complainant’s narrative at every stage and conducted a protracted failure of an investigation. 

At the risk of repeating myself, I suggest that the process is the punishment.