Notice is given of the intention of the Georgia Green Party to convene as its Annual Convention on Saturday, July 24th, from 10am until 4pm, for the purposes of conducting elections for internal party offices, considering a proposed amendment to the bylaws of the Georgia party and to consider the report of the state party’s Committee on the Green Party Platform; particularly with respect to the adoption or rejection of the fourteen proposed revisions timely file for consideration in the party’s 2021 platform revision cycle.
To obtain credentials to participate as a voting delegate, please seek election from your county affiliate or caucus. Those party members prepared now to convene county caucuses to name delegates to this convention are urged to write the credentials committee named by the convention convenors and the state party officers to schedule an opportunity to do so on the party’s conference call hosting platform and to access other technical support for their efforts. You may do so by addressing your email to:
Ann Menasche <aemenasche@georgiagreenparty.org>
counsel assisting in defense of Georgia Green Party Hugh Escoemail
Secretary, Georgia Green Party
Expert Witnesses Testify to Defend Georgia Green Party State Party faces Expulsion from National Party over Support for Rights of Women, Safeguarding of Children Georgia Party Defense Witnesses Denied Hearing
Last week, the Georgia Green Party released videotaped testimony of six expert witnesses who were denied a hearing before the Accreditations Committee, as a part of their defense in proceedings seeking to revoke the accreditation of the Georgia party as a member of the Green Party of the United States.
On December 23, 2020, the National Lavender Caucus (LC) filed a complaint against Georgia seeking the revocation of its accreditation as a member of the national Green Party. Since then, the Georgia Party has been forced to battle spurious charges of transphobia while being denied a fair opportunity to defend itself. The Accreditations Committee is expected to soon refer the Complaint against Georgia to the Green National Committee.
At the heart of the LC’s Complaint is an amendment to the Georgia party’s platform endorsing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights. This Declaration has so far been signed by 18,189 signers from 137 countries and 344 organizations. The Declaration reaffirms women and girls’ existing sex based rights under international law. It challenges the discrimination women face as a result of changes in law and policy, replacing sex with gender identity as a protected class. Critics claim that ‘gender identity’ is built on circular definitions and sexist stereotypes. The Declaration and the Georgia party platform amendments challenge the medical “transitioning” of minor children, incapable of informed consent, known to result in sterility and other severe medical issues, ‘turning healthy bodies into life-long medical patients’ according to Georgia party officers.
Hugh Esco, Secretary of the Georgia Party, described the proceedings before the Accreditations Committee as “a star chamber-like kangaroo court” marred by numerous procedural irregularities, and “a public embarrassment for a Party which is supposed to value grassroots democracy.” Those irregularities are expected to be catalogued in a forthcoming report, but include a refusal to allow Georgia to have its own witnesses heard by the Committee.
80% of the improvement in my mental health has been the rejection of queer theory and gender ideology as a part of my identity and a part of understanding what gender dysphoria is. . . .
On May 11th of this year, the Georgia Green Party submitted a brief in its defense, along with a witness list and a request for a hearing at which it might offer its witnesses. The Committee in a May 16th response from CoChair Andy Ellis wrote that they “have decided to reject the request.”
The Georgia party conducted video depositions on May 22nd and 23rd, inviting the Complainants to send counsel to cross-examine its Defense witnesses.
The witnesses, denied a hearing before the Accreditation Committee, and featured in the depositions released last week include:
Kimberly, who identifies as transgender, formerly coordinated transgender health services for young people at a multi-disciplinary clinic in British Columbia. Kimberly testified to making the choice as an adult to transition due largely to the homophobia encountered as a lesbian and expressed concerns about the ‘ideological capture’ of the ‘systems of care’ which currently shapes gender medicine, testifying that “80% of the improvement in my mental health has been the rejection of queer theory and gender ideology as a part of my identity and a part of understanding what gender dysphoria is”.
Kimberly is one of six experts who have provided taped testimony so far in the Georgia Green Party’s defense, responding to the charges leveled against them. Additional video depositions are planned to cover the balance of the Defense witness list.
“No one joins the Green party to hate. We reject the narrative that standing for the rights of women and girls constitutes bigotry against trans-identified people”, said David Josue, cochair of the Georgia party. “The Accreditations Committee has denied us a fair opportunity to mount a defense before their Committee. Nonetheless, we fully intend to take our case directly to the Green National Committee and to the world at large”.
For background on the assault on democracy under way
within the Green Party of the United States
explore the links available under the
Internal Democracy option in the menu at: https://www.dialoguenotexpulsion.org/
Snowden, . . . there is no fair trial on offer now . . .
An authoritarian coup is afoot within the National Committee to purge the party of independent and critical thinking. Among other evidence of this is the complaint of the National Lavender Caucus filed with the Accreditation Committee seeking the revocation of this state party’s accreditation as a member of the national party. The Georgia Green Party has filed its response. Included in those pleadings was a witness list and a request that the committee schedule a hearing to take the testimony of our expert witnesses. The Accreditation Committee has failed to respond to our request for a hearing, and our allies on that committee have indicated that they are unlikely to do so. This weekend the party’s defense team is hosting depositions to take the testimony of its witnesses. And observers are welcome to join the call to observe the testimony live. Seats are limited and you can register here.
The officers having conferred, the quick decision council is agreed to the following resolution.
Whereas, within hours of taking the oath of office, President Biden signed Executive Order #13988, ostensibly for the purpose of “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation”; and
Whereas, as anticipated by recent amendments to the state party platform, irresponsible policy makers failed “to find nuanced approaches which will protect (trans-identified individuals) without gutting from (existing law) the gains that women have made for the protection of the sex-based rights of women under the law”; and
Whereas, on Thursday, February 25th, Democrats in the the U.S. House of Representatives passed on a 224-206 vote, without any hearings, markup or the consideration of any amendments, the so-called Equality Act, which similarly discarded caution, nuance and the multiple concerns being raised by women for the protection of the sex-based rights won by a century and a half of women’s organizing; and
Whereas, multiple women’s organizations have endorsed a series of events organized as “Women Picket DC”, and are asking supporters to join them in Washington D.C. for International Women’s Day, March 8th and events across the weekend, and have published a call for participation and endorsements at: https://womenpicketdc.org/.
Resolved, that the Quick Decision Council on behalf of the Georgia Green Party, here endorses the Women Picket DC action and encourages Greens in Georgia and elsewhere to participate in these events.
The Coalition for the Feminist Amendments (“CoFA”) discuss the Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act. This event was organized by Feminists in Struggle (FIST), the original authors of these amendments, as well as the LGB Alliance USA, XX Amazons, and the Georgia Green Party, each an early endorser of this FAEA approach. The four speakers, Ann Menasche (FIST member and co-author of the FAEA), Tina Minkowitz (FAEA co-author), Callie Burt (Associate Professor, Georgia State University), and M. Lynette Hartsell (LGB Alliance USA), give an in-depth analysis of the Feminist Amendments and make a compelling case for joining this effort.
Beginning Sunday, February 28th, Kweku Lumumba, cochair of the Georgia Green Party will host a monthly virtual meeting to serve as an orientation for Georgia Greens with an interest in learning about the process of forming an affiliate of the Georgia Green Party in their county, or perhaps serving as a local contact for the party, if they are not ready to organize or host local meetings.
Please forgive our clunky process. We are asking that you first register with our conference hosting platform to get an email sent to you with the connection credentials for the call.
And then also next share with the party your contact information, letting us know of you interest in this conversation, so we can communicate with you going forward.
Madame and Mister Co-Chairs,
members of the Accreditation Committee:
This letter is written in response to a complaint1 filed with the Accreditation Committee on the eve of Christmas, just past, by the National Lavender Caucus (NLC).
In their complaint (referred to in this document as the NLC complaint or the complaint), the complainant seeks action by the Accreditation Committee with the intended result of ‘suspending’ the Georgia Green Party, placing our state party on ‘inactive status’; or alternately to take action to ‘disaccredit’ our state party, by asking the Green National Committee to sever its relationship with the Georgia party.
The Georgia Green Party has been and remains a member in good standing with the Green Party of the United States since 1999. The Georgia party organized in 1995, filing its governing documents with the Georgia Secretary of State in 1996. The Atlanta Greens, founded in 1989 had served as the base of our state party. It had been an active member of this national party’s predecessor organization, the Greens / Green Party (usa) since 1991.
The NLC complaint fails to state an actionable claim that either proposed outcome is justified. We urge that this committee (1) reject this complaint, (2) exercise patience that the party’s process for the democratic revision to its platform will function to resolve disputes among accredited members over platform language and (3) allow our state and national parties to return to the important work of building capacity for the election cycle which began as the polls closed November 3rd, 2020.
To read the entire response, please see the download link above.
So have many brilliant and insightful women before her, and since. But below I want to focus for a moment and raise a glass in appreciation for Ms. Donym’s key contributions.
So has the Green Party. The Georgia Green Party, at its 2001 Athens Convention adopted a Family plank adding language to its Platform, reading: “We recognize a right to marry or to form similar committed relationships, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.” This was three years before New Paltz New York Mayor Jason West, elected as a Green, issued marriage licenses to gay couples. We did so seven years before the Prop-8 fight in California. We adopted our position fourteen years before a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v Hodges (576 US 644) found that the right to marry is a fundamental right protected by the Equal Protection clause, even for same-sex couples.
But Obergefell was not to be the last word in the cultural and legal struggle to afford basic human rights to lesbians and gay people.
I am not cisgendered. Because womanhood is a ‘sex’. Gender is irrelevant.
Ms. Donym’s work clearly came a generation or two later than the women at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference (a site of some of the early skirmishes), or Janice Raymond‘s 1979 book, nearly a generation after Sheila Jeffries book from 2003, though only a couple of years after her 2014 book on the subject. Even so, Ms. Donym’s investigative journalism helped blaze a trail which has given rise to a movement of resistance.
The National Lavender Caucus of the Green Party of the United States, on Christmas Eve, filed its complaint seeking the dis-accreditation of the Georgia Green Party, a member in good standing since 1999. The infrastructure of the national party has been captured by authoritarian tendencies which have no respect for the party’s values for feminism, grassroots democracy and a respect for diversity. Feminist voices within the party have been repeatedly silenced in every conceivable forum for engagement within the party, including its National Women’s Caucus (but see also here, here and here).
Blame it on our own party’s failure to conduct the ongoing political education so necessary for the development of independent political power. Blame it on Judith Butler (see more), postmodernism (here also) and queer theory. Blame it on the influx into the green party of young socialists — refugees from the splintering of the old left, who failed to check their sectarian ways at the door as they crossed the welcome mat into the big tent party Greens have sought to build to speak to the political aspirations and majoritarian values of this nation. Blame it on cancel culture (or here); or our nation’s frightening hostility towards civil engagement over political differences, vigorous debate and the value of critical thinking. Blame it on social media and attention spans which in three generations declined from consuming ideas a book at a time, to a thirty minute television program at a time, to a three minute music video at a time, to the 140 character format of text messages and micro-blogs.
Ms. Donym’s investigative journalism followed the money. She and Jennifer Bilek have done more to identify the autogynephilic billionaire men who have funded the lobby for trans-ideology, and to map its think tanks which seek to undermine our very language and the network of institutional capture which has propagated their work.
Only a few weeks ago, the state committee of the Rhode Island party (including still two of the earliest founders of the U.S. Green Party, Dr. Tony Affigne and Greg Gerrit) severed its ties with the national party. As one member of their party shared with me in a private email this week, they had “had enough of the clowns”. The national committee is now in the midst of a vote, prevailing at the moment by a 79-18-2 margin, to purge the Alaska party from our ranks. I have heard that in the queue for their purge after they have dispensed with the Georgia Green Party is Minnesota as well; I have no idea why.
I will leave for other venues and another time any discussion of the RI, AK and MN parties. But will say that the offense claimed by the Lavender Caucus, in their complaint against Georgia is ideological. At our February 22nd, 2020 state convention in Bonaire Georgia, the Georgia Green Party adopted changes to the state platform which leaned on Ms. Donym’s research, and the leadership of a large number of women who have challenged so-called ‘liberal feminism’ and its apologia for the mens sexual rights movement built by autogynephilic men. In short, the feelings of the Lavender Caucus were hurt by our adoption of platform positions, that:
“We will regulate access to gender-affirming therapies to protect Georgia children from medical experimentation, prosecuting ethical violations involved with subjecting children incapable of fully informed consent to such life-changing and irreversible procedures. We will protect women and girls from unfair competition in sports by male-bodied athletes. We will protect girls and women in the enjoyment of female-only facilities, programs, or services, particularly in places where women have a need to be in a state of undress, or where their privacy may be compromised or their safety may be at risk from
male-pattern violence.”
In the piece linked below, published only this week, Sue Donym reflects back on our victories in 2020. She claims vindication for the abuse thrown her way since her “Inauthentic Selves” article from the Summer of 2018. And she challenges us to abandon the language of trans-ideology, funded by the trans billionaires, crafted by think tanks, honed in focus groups, propagated with anti-democratic tactics through a broad international network of captured public and civic institutions, designed to cloud critical thinking and enforced as compelled thought and speech with pronoun sharing rituals and criminal sanctions. She asks us to stop referring to the young people now looking for legal representation as ‘detransitioners’, when what we really mean is that they are engaged in ‘conversion therapy recovery’. In this article, she reminds us that before kids and parents and doctors expressed their homophobia, internalized for the former, with ‘trans-away-the-gay conversion therapy’, we used to send our gender non-conforming kids off to ‘pray-away-the-gay conversion therapy’ residential programs.
Addressing herself explicitly to those recovering from the ‘trans-away’ form of conversion therapy, this is what Ms. Donym had to say in her own words:
“I’m not denying you agency. Many of you may have chosen to partake in the new conversion therapy. So did many homosexuals and bisexuals before you: there were plenty of willing subjects to conversion therapy studies in the 50s and 60s. We live in a deeply homophobic world. The choices you made to try and survive it, are no different to the choices some of your ancestors in our family made before you. Those ancestors often admitted to living lies after therapy, healed and recovered and lived full lives as homosexuals. Obscuring that the choices you made to try and survive are no different to the homosexuals who came before you denies you a link to the past, to history, to solidarity, to a pathway to healing and accepting, and then to fighting — even if you just live life as a lesbian with a white picket fence, large dogs, and Birkenstocks, you’re still fighting. Because there are plenty of people who think it’s preferable that you pretend to be something you aren’t than to be what you really are.”
But before you do, know that the Georgia Green Party is not backing down. We remain committed to building independent political power. We remain committed to Green values including feminism, grassroots democracy and a respect for diversity. Efforts to silence us on the important questions we have raised have only made us more resolute that these questions deserve answers. We are not afraid of the trans lobby’s bullying tactics, nor its cancel culture, nor its group think insistence that we ‘be nice’ and not question the science denying delusional thinking that asks that we embrace neuro-sexism (see also) or toss a belief in biology out the window.
While trans-ideology insists that sex is a spectrum, we still believe that mammals, including humans, remain sexually dimorphic. None of the GMOs coursing through our food supply have changed that fact. Six months in, and still no one has claimed the $1 million dollar reward offered by GenderHeretics.org for anyone able to identify a third gamete and provide an explanation of its role in human reproduction. We are confident that this reward will remain unclaimed 6,000 years from now as well.
And if, come March or April, we find ourselves no longer an accredited member of the Green Party of the United States, rest assured we will continue our work as the Georgia Green Party to lead the way on matters of public policy, to build independent political power, to engage Georgia citizens as candidates ready to challenge corporate power and Georgia voters as Green Party supporters willing to back those candidates at each of our local precincts.
Ms. Donym’s investigative journalism followed the money. She and Jennifer Bilek have done more to identify the autogynephilic billionaire men who have funded the lobby for trans-ideology, and to map its