Sue Donym led the way.
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.”
I highly recommend reading her insights in context, by linking to:
For 2021, Stop Polishing The Trans Turd
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.
2021-01-10 at 8:47 am
It’s appalling that women’s rights are under attack by people calling themselves green. I must disagree, though, with “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”.
There’s nothing socialist about the attack on women’s rights. Both socialist and green politics are being infected by a currently fashionable misogyny. True, there’s always been sectarianism on the left, and women’s issues were often neglected. But I’ve never known women’s rights being attacked and withdrawn as they are now.