Growing Pains: Inside The Green Party Gender Row
10 min read
With four MPs in Westminster, the Green Party is enjoying record-breaking success. However, behind closed doors, the party is navigating a fierce debate on gender issues, which some say could “tear the party apart”.
As the Conservative vote imploded, and Labour lost support over its stance on Gaza, the Green Party offered an alternative for disaffected voters at the general election. The party led by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, now both MPs themselves, has quadrupled its representation in Parliament. The Greens are feeling buoyant.
Behind the scenes, however, trouble is brewing. With Labour’s Corbynite flank welcomed into the fold, more traditional, environmentally focused Green Party members are feeling sidelined by the influx of younger, more socially liberal types who are often motivated by identity politics.
Nowhere is this tension more stark than on gender issues. Since 2021, 10 members of Green Party Women (GPW), a group founded to “defend and extend the rights of women and girls”, have been suspended or expelled from the party. At least 17 signatories of the Green Women’s Declaration, which advocates for women as a sex, have faced the same.
The official reasons for these expulsions vary. GPW believes this is a deliberate attack on women who defend their sex-based rights.
Amanda Stones is one of those who believes she has been targeted for her views on gender. She was kicked out of the Green Party in July for breaching a clause of its constitution that prohibits members from campaigning for someone standing against a Green candidate.
She was told by the Green Party Regional Council (GPRC), which oversees disciplinary processes, that she had been campaigning on behalf of Sheffield Central Independent candidate Alison Teal via an anonymised X account. Teal was suspended from the Green Party in 2022 for arguing that sex is a biological characteristic which cannot change over time.
The X account had previously tweeted a “partial picture of her face”, the GPRC argued, which “clearly matches that of Amanda Stones”. Yet Stones claims the woman in the picture is not her.
“I told the party, ‘that's not me, and you haven't got any evidence that is me’,” she says. “I've been targeted since I stood for election for Green Party Women.” Stones has been expelled from the party for five years with no right to appeal.
Along with four other former GPW chairs, Stones is now considering legal action against the party. Financial auditors have previously warned that the Greens faced “uncertainty” in continuing to run normally, after leadership hopeful Shahrarah Ali successfully sued the party for unfair dismissal over his gender-critical views.
Three more members were also expelled from the Green Party in July under the same clause.
Mandy Vere, 68, is a founding signatory of Green Women’s Declaration. She was expelled in July after facilitating a webinar in which Alison Teal and Zoe Hatch, a suspended former Green Party Women chair, were speaking.
While Vere acted as co-host of the webinar, she says this was only to help with the tech and to answer questions on the chat. Instead, the complainant “jumped to the conclusion” that a co-host sits on the executive of the Green Women’s Declaration.
It's no way to treat members; it's discriminatory and it is likely to lead to more court cases
The complainant alleged that the webinar represented involvement in Teal’s parliamentary campaign. For this, Vere was expelled for five years with no right to appeal.
“It's no way to treat members; it's discriminatory and it is likely to lead to more court cases,” Vere says. “I’m going to have to weigh up my options. And I think there's quite a number of women and one or two men doing the same at the moment.”
Hazel Pegg, who sits on the GPW committee, was also expelled for attending the webinar. Pegg used to sit on the Green Party Executive but resigned after a footnote stating that sex-based rights can be seen as questioning the right of trans people to exist was included on an official document. One other Green Party member was expelled but did not want to be named.
In July, Brighton Pavilion MP Siân Berry took to X to praise her party’s lack of whipping system, which allows Green MPs to “vote with our conscience”. But those expelled say having no whip means the party lacks is avoiding culpability.accountability for recent suspensions.
Jude English was suspended as a Bristol councillor in March. She claimed she received a no-fault suspension to prevent her from standing as a candidate. She is now taking the party to court.
“Because we don't have accountability in a discipline system, this particular group of people, the GPRC, have appointed themselves the whip, and they're using no- fault suspension as the whip,” she says.
The GPRC is seen as judge, jury and executioner by those expelled. They claim a group of trans activists have taken control of the council and are purging the party of gender-critical voices.
English claims the GPRC is “completely taken over by gender ideology types” who have “been suspending anybody they don't like – anybody who they see as difficult or just wanting to ask a question or say, ‘can we talk about this, or can we have debate?’ And because they've got this power, there's no counteraction.”
She adds: “It is a witch-hunt. The people who are behind it are looking for people who dissent, and then they're picking them off as soon as they can.”
While gender-critical voices are being expelled from the party, the Greens are looking to shore up partnerships with like-minded groups on trans rights. In the run up to the election, the Women’s Equality Party – which favours self-ID, the ability to change legal sex without medical requirements – endorsed Berry for Brighton Pavilion.
In July, a message was shared on the Green Party’s conference agenda forum by Green Party executive chair Jon Nott. It stated that, following the WEP’s endorsement of Berry, “the party executive will be discussing proposals for closer co-operation between our two parties”.
In the view of former GPW chair Zoe Hatch, who was suspended from the party in 2023, this was a move to “make the party look pro-women in response to recent negative publicity, leverage [WEP founder Sandi] Toksvig’s celebrity or get more trans activists in the party”.
One member who saw the message said she responded by reading the WEP website to find there was “zilch” on environmental policies. “They don't have to have policies on everything, but you think if the Green Party was going to hook up with some feminist birds from another organisation we'd actually want the environment to be kind of there,” they say.
The member agrees with Hatch that the alliance with the WEP seems to be a way for the Green Party to prove it is acting on behalf of women. They claim women are generally “invisible” within the Greens: “If you look through their manifesto, we were only mentioned as ‘women and girls’ in the short manifesto version that went out online.”
I think Adrian has that calculation that if he says anything – even just says, ‘let's be nice to one another’ – he risks undermining his own position
While intra-party fighting may be inevitable when a grassroots party quickly scales up, insiders warn that the Green MPs are also divided on issues of gender.
Nathan Williams, who was expelled from the party in March, claims that Denyer and Berry are “true believers” who “would love to throw all the gender-critical members out of the party”.
Berry lodged the complaint that saw former GPW chair Emma Bateman expelled from the party in 2023. Denyer has publicly condemned LGB Alliance, an advocacy group founded in opposition to the policies of LGBT- rights charity Stonewall on transgender issues, as a “hate group”. In contrast, Williams says Denyer’s co-leader Ramsay is “publicly extraordinarily quiet on the issue”.
“I think he is concerned about it and is very concerned about the toxicity and the way that gender critical people are being treated,” Williams says of Ramsay. “But I think Adrian has that calculation that if he says anything – even just says, ‘let's be nice to one another’ – he risks undermining his own position.”
In April, the Green Party issued a statement on the Cass Review, which looked at NHS gender services for children and young people, and led to a UK ban on prescribing puberty blockers to under-18s with gender dysphoria.
The party’s statement was swiftly withdrawn after the LGBTIQA+ Greens threatened to remove their support for the party’s leaders in the general election, a former GPW chair has claimed. The Green Party did not dispute that it removed the statement from its website.
While Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s decision to keep the Conservatives’ ban on puberty blockers drew the ire of some Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, the Green Party has not made a statement on the development. The party did not respond to a request for comment on Streeting’s decision to continue the ban.
My personal feeling now is that the Green Party is, sadly, probably a lost cause
Perhaps the Greens are exercising caution on these issues on the basis of its the party’s experiences in Scotland: when the Bute Agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Green Party ended, some attributed its failure to the public growing weary of the quasi-coalition government prioritising equality issues over the cost of living. For the Scottish National Party, the Greens were to blame. Shortly afterwards, the Scottish Green Party expelled 13 members for signing a declaration stating that biological women were entitled to sex-based rights and protections.
Robin Harper, former leader of the Scottish Green Party and the UK’s first Green parliamentarian, left the party to join Labour over its stance on gender issues in June. He tells The House that if the Greens in England and Wales continue “ignoring 50 per cent of their membership” it could “tear the party apart”.
“The trans debate is going to dominate matters. They’ve lost their grip here, they’re really very much in the hands of the trans movement,” he says.
Harper is urging his local government association to consider setting up a citizen’s assembly to debate gender issues.
“I think it could tear the party apart,” he says. “That's why I'm suggesting that they do this quiet route of a citizen's assembly, as they did in Éire. This is what they really desperately need to do – to defuse the situation and get the discussion [going]. And also, a commitment to science – please, please, a commitment to science.”
Ahead of the England and Wales’ Green Party autumn conference, members are bringing forward a motion to formally address these expulsions and suspensions.
Entitled “End the Purge”, the motion states that “a majority of the present membership of GPRC have acted in ways which are both contrary to the constitution of the Green Party and potentially unlawful in view of the Shahrar Ali case and other recent legal precedents”.
It demands “all the present members of GPRC to stand down” and all members suspended or expelled for gender-critical reasons to “have their bans on rejoining the party revoked and their memberships reinstated immediately via a general amnesty”.
However, it remains to be seen whether the motion will attract 50 supporting members for it to be heard at conference. For now, there is a feeling among those expelled that the Green Party will never return to its traditional green roots.
“My personal feeling now is that the Green Party is, sadly, probably a lost cause,” says Williams. “It will become a fringe party, more about identity politics and trans rights with a vague environmental add- on, but will be primarily an extreme social justice party.
“And that's fine for such a party to exist, but anyone who cares for has environment as the most important thing is best to steer clear of it.”
The Green Party did not respond to a request for comment on individual reported cases of suspensions or expulsions from the party.
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