The Green Party's war on women Magical thinking has replaced ecological clarity

Zack Polanski is no stranger to magical thinking. Back in 2013, long before he became leader of the Green party, he claimed that hypnosis could increase breast cup size. He later apologized, admitting he had failed to recognize “that issues of misogyny and women’s body confidence exist in society”. But that magical thinking — the feeling that the world can be reshaped if you only say the right words — has lingered. In him. And through his Party.

Polanski insists his party is inclusive. Only the other week he declared it a “broad church”— though he did add, with a telling caveat, that “even churches have walls”. He might have thought he was being artful, but the soundbite was revealing. There’s a darker story currently playing out within the Green church: there are views that are tolerated, and views that aren’t. Indeed, over the past five years, the Greens have built walls high enough to shut out dozens of their own members — many of them women — whose only crime was to hold gender-critical views.

This week, Polanski is trumpeting a triumphant conference: “It’s exceeded my expectations,” he said, counting all his new members. Presumably, though, this doesn’t include those his party has canceled, including the women’s rights group Green Women’s Declaration (GWD) who were turned away at the door. Their booking for a conference stall was canceled, something that has been described as undemocratic and discriminatory — as well as being anti-women. But little of this makes it into the public realm.

My investigation tells the story of those people: the women who joined the Greens to fight for a “fairer greener future”, only to find themselves denounced, gagged and expelled. I have discovered an atmosphere of intimidation where safeguarding failures are ignored and political heresies are punished.

What emerges from it all is a portrait of a party in the grip of magical thinking. The Green Party still claims to be the radical conscience of British politics. But for many of those it has expelled, the truth is far more troubling.

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For decades, a radical clarity defined the movement. Formalized in 1972 as the PEOPLE Party, it was fighting for something tangible: survival. Born of the anti-nuclear movement, it understood the limits of our planet long before climate change entered the mainstream. Ecology was its brand. But it never really found electoral success.

Then, in 2010, the election of Caroline Lucas — “Queen Caroline” as they like to call her — as the party’s first MP gave them a breakthrough and a national voice. As mainstream parties dithered over whether climate change even existed, Lucas talked of imminent collapse and the necessity of action. Today, though, as a result of growing public awareness of global warming and the diminishing power of the other parties, the party today is more successful than its founders could ever have imagined. It has four Members of Parliament and hundreds of local councilors. It came second in 39 seats in the last general election.

The party finally appears to have broken into the system it loves to critique. It is part of the Westminster establishment.

But as success waxed, that ecological clarity waned. And in recent years, conference motions have been dominated not by debates on rewilding or energy transition or Net Zero, but resolutions on gender identity and the policing of language. In 2019, a third of all internal motions dealt with trans rights. By 2021, leadership campaigns revolved around whether “gender-critical” members could even belong to the party. Motions for discussion on items such as “women’s sex-based rights” were labeled as “non inclusive” and women were removed from the list of oppressed groups. But none of this could be raised by the female membership without being accused of transphobia.

For many long-time members, this felt like a hijack. “I joined the Greens to fight climate change,” one former activist told me. “I left because it became impossible to say that women’s rights mattered without being accused of bigotry.” The moral capture of the party isn’t restricted to Britain. It’s endemic at an international level. As Peter Ungar, Leader of Hungary’s Green Party puts it: “Disagreement is reframed as moral failure. Critics are not ‘wrong’, they’re ‘fascists’.”

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Emma Bateman’s story is an object lesson in how the Greens deal with dissent. She joined in 2009, throwing herself into anti-nuclear activism and local environmental campaigning. But in 2019 she noticed a shift in the party culture: proposals to redefine “woman” were being pushed through without consultation. And by 2021, she had been suspended.

That spring, she had drafted a conference motion with the title — Ensuring Sex and Gender Are Not Conflated When Gathering Data To Make Policy. The aim was simple: distinguishing biological sex from gender identity when shaping statistics. But the phrasing — separating “males from females” was heresy.

Bateman tells me that she expected opposition, although not censorship. Yet when the debate came, the session chair refused to take her motion. Bateman tried to object, but she and her supporters were muted in the online conference platform. “I was raging but powerless,” she recalled. Two days later, she was suspended from the party for “bringing the Greens into disrepute”. No hearing, no due process, no defense.

Later she discovered that then co-leader Siân Berry had already planned to prevent her attending “to protect trans and non-binary members from having to listen to my ‘transphobic’ opinion that males are not female and men are not women”.

Senior figures could have stepped in, but they chose silence over leadership. Bateman’s conclusion is blunt: “It was ideological. They didn’t care about fairness or rules, only compliance.”

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Ironically, a well-intentioned attempt to make the party truly democratic — by creating an internal structure which challenges traditional power structures — is in large part to blame. Those at the helm — the leaders and deputy leaders — are prevented from having a veto which, combined with a recent, hugely successful, push to attract young members, and confer special status upon them, has led to the ideological capture of the movement by a throng of mainly middle-class, university-educated, strongly woke-leaning young people.

The recruitment drive targeting young Green voters was pushed in part by “Queen Caroline”, who has, over the years, retreated from her former feminist stance. Back in 2009, for example, she urged the party to re-examine its policy on prostitution saying, “Poverty and patriarchy drive prostitution, not individual free choice”. These days, in stark contrast, she is a firm supporter of total decriminalization of the sex industry — including brothel owning and sex buying. She has also been on a “journey when it comes to understanding a new way of thinking about gender”.

It’s a journey that the rest of the party has been taken on — whether they like it or not.

Today, Polanski wholeheartedly supports the gender ideology that has prevailed in the Green Party over the past decade or more; he believes the Supreme Court judgment about what constitutes a woman is “thinly veiled transphobia” and has stated that transphobic rhetoric will “not be tolerated” under his leadership. In this, he is perpetuating the party’s increasingly inflexible stance on gender ideology. And it’s something that is tearing the party apart, as those who dare to push back against the hard-line stance will find themselves exiled.

For if Bateman’s expulsion showed how ordinary members of the party were treated, the downfall of Shahrar Ali revealed that not even the leadership is safe from the Green thought-police.

Ali served as deputy leader of the Green Party from 2014 to 2016, a respected politician and significant figure within the organization. But his stance on gender identity would become his undoing. In September 2021, Ali re-tweeted words he had originally posted a year earlier: “A woman is commonly defined as an adult human female and, genetically, typified by two XX chromosomes. These facts are not in dispute, nor should they be in any political party.” This, though, was deemed to be in conflict with Party policy. While the statement was factually accurate and even legally protected under UK equality law, within the Greens, it was treated as blasphemy. Complaints were made, juries were convened and Ali was removed as an official spokesman.

Ali fought back, taking the party to court in the first protected-belief discrimination case ever brought against a UK political party — and won. Yet even after his legal victory, the Greens found new complaints to uphold, suspending him for years unless he renounced his views on sex and gender. “It’s ideological capture,” Ali says as he prepares a second lawsuit, warning that this and escalating legal bills thought to amount to around £1 million are pushing the Greens towards bankruptcy and moral collapse.

The contrast with how other members are treated, meanwhile, is stark. Ali’s story isn’t just a cautionary tale for the gender critical members of the former ecological party, it is also the perfect illustration of the Green’s authoritarian incoherence. Earlier this week, Polanski claimed that his party had “no space for racism, homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia”. And in his conference speech he reiterated that stance. Yet while any vocalizing of biological facts is intolerable, other bigotries are allowed to run riot.

Consider the outspoken new joint deputy leader Mothin Ali, who faced no sanction for his inflammatory comments about Israel and Gaza. This, remember, is a man who celebrated his election to Leeds City Council by shouting “We will NOT be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. ALLAH HU AKBAR!” In February, he was reported to the party after featuring in a video posted on October 7, in which he implied the atrocities were justified because Palestinians have the “right to fight back against occupiers”. There has been no sanction.

Meanwhile, the language generally used by Kathryn Bristow, one of the current Co-chairs of LGBTIQA+ Greens is similarly illuminating. Bristow identifies as a disabled, neurodiverse, black trans woman and is also known by the drag name, Holt Fracking.

After the constituency office of Wes Streeting was smashed up and vandalized in response to his ban on puberty blockers, Bristow celebrated, quoting Martin Luther King on X: “These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellion to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.” No investigation, no suspension. And yet Bristow was advocating violence. The way in which Party officials approach the public statements of members like Bristow and Mothin Ali differs starkly from their approach to those who express belief in the reality of biological sex.

As one former (male) member told me: “The complaints system is a closed loop – some of the same people sit on every committee: decision, discipline, appeals. I used to be a Young Communist — I understand the idealism. But this is authoritarianism in disguise.”

But it’s the female feminists who are really being targeted as the Green’s old permissive ethos is displaced by this young totalitarian faction. And their punitive measures are powerful and abundant. Several members spoke to me in dark terms about the “No-fault suspension” (NFS), a disciplinary measure which temporarily removes members from the party until a complaint made against them is heard. During my investigation, I found it to be systematic and strategic, deployed against those who object to “authoritarian” edicts. And it is used overwhelmingly to silence gender-critical members. Some have returned to the party after the complaint has not been upheld, some have returned after winning appeals and many have chosen not to return. To date, well over 40 women (and a smaller cohort of men) have been expelled for the crime of “transphobia”.

I wrote to Lucas, setting out my allegations about her: that she had failed to protect the women and men expelled from the party against a witch hunt. She declined to speak to me, but in an email said since the party’s internal disciplinary process is  entirely independent of Party leadership, she never had any influence over these  decisions and “was advised” not to “intervene in or comment upon them”.

But those who have been silenced by an NFS tend to see it differently. They see it as an abdication of leadership. Eric Walker, a D-Day veteran who turned 100 this year, had been active in the environmental movement for over half a century. He joined the Greens in 2014 and has contributed tirelessly to the cause, a living link to the party’s radical past. But his downfall came 10 years after he joined, in January 2024, when he posted messages in a private email group for senior members.

His crime was to have discussed the psychiatric comorbidities of young people who suffer from gender dysphoria. “I said that some trans-identified individuals have severe mental health issues or are children who become convinced they should be female after looking stuff up on the internet,” Walker tells me. He has, he insists, been sympathetic to trans people for decades; he made a film about dysphoria back in 1978 called Trapped Inside the Wrong Body. But his defense was ignored and he was ultimately expelled. As he said earlier this year, “What galls me the most is that the council keeps members in exiled purgatory indefinitely. They ensure we are cut off from any contact with the party, whilst also expecting us to keep our suspensions a secret.”

Another veteran, Dr Freda Davis, 83, met a similar fate. A Green since 2007, she had watched the party “warp” under the influence of student recruits and Stonewall-aligned activists. For her, warning signs included a Young Greens co-chair scrawling “Death to all cis women” on her notepad, in sight of others, at an executive meeting representing the council, and the hostile takeover of Green Party Women (GPW). As she tells me, “It’s authoritarianism in a party that claims to be anti-authoritarian.”

In January 2024 she was expelled for “transphobia and queerphobia” after a “trans-ally” infiltrated the Green Seniors’ email group and reported back.

The Guide to Queerphobia is the text behind the authoritarianism. The tome to which all must concede. It is an attempt to police bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination, and was pushed to become party policy by the LGBTIQA+ in 2023. It was initially rejected. Such are its wild claims that it states, among other things, that to say any form of sexual attraction is harmful. When I asked the LGBTIQA+ Greens whether “consensual” torture could be seen as harmful, I was called queerphobic. But so determined was this rump of the party that they lobbied the Green Party Regional Council (GPRC) — the forum of last resort for disciplinary matters — which bent to their will.

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“For a party standing on the shoulders of Greenham Women and the radical feminist environment movement, the party has strayed so far from its roots it is almost unrecognizable,” says Zoe Hatch, former co-chair of Green Party Women (expelled).

The divide between Green Party Women, once the largest and most influential of the party’s official member groups, and the Young Greens, is where the debate is at its most toxic. As she explains, unlike the other “special interest” Green groups, Young Greens is more like “a party within a party”. It has been granted special status — has its own national structure, committees, and local groups. It wields sprawling power: many of the complaints made about feminist members around gender ideology within the party come from Young and LGBTIQA+ Greens — and in October 2023 the Feminist Greens, Young Greens and others signed a petition calling for a vote of no confidence in GPW.

Within weeks, Hatch — party member since 2015, election agent, local party chair, parliamentary candidate, and most recently elected co-chair of GPW — was abruptly suspended, with expulsion looming. Her offense was to be leading a GPW investigation into discrimination against women; she had compiled a dossier of evidence for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), setting out in detail the detriment faced by women in the party who held gender-critical views.

By the end of the year, GPW itself had been effectively dismantled. The party leadership stripped it of recognition as an official special interest group. In early 2024, GPW was reinstated after elections brought in a new committee, but only on the condition that a rival group, Feminist Greens, was simultaneously recognized. The “compromise” was emblematic of the party’s direction: GPW could only return if its voice was diluted and counterbalanced by a new, ideologically compliant faction.

Those who attempted to defend GPW fared little better. The Equalities and Diversity Coordinator who oversaw its reinstatement was himself suspended and expelled, his crime — you guessed it — being “on the side” of GPW.

But the party, as we have seen, is fraught with contradictions, and here things are no different. The speed and ferocity of these expulsions contrasted starkly with the party’s approach to safeguarding. Structures meant to protect the vulnerable were slow to respond when genuine risks were raised, yet were weaponized with startling efficiency against gender-critical women.

The notorious Challenor scandal is the clearest example of this. In November 2016, David Challenor was charged with 22 serious sexual offenses, including the kidnap, rape, and torture of a 10-year-old child. While on bail, he acted as Green Party election agent for his trans-identified son Aimee in both the 2017 and 2018 elections. The Challenor family home — where David had kept his victim captive, abusing the child while dressed as a little girl, and often in “adult nappies” — had even been used as an official Green Party address since 2015.

When David was finally jailed for 22 years in August 2018, it emerged that Aimee — then serving as the party’s Equalities Spokesperson and seen as a rising star tipped for deputy leadership — had failed to inform party leadership of the charges. Aimee’s suspension came only after public outrage, fueled by a Sunday Times report that made clear the extent of his knowledge and involvement.

The party’s response was telling. Caroline Lucas, then co-leader, wrote her only public statement on the scandal in The Guardian. While condemning David Challenor’s crimes, her focus was not on the safeguarding breaches, but on alleged “transphobia” directed at Aimee.

The independent inquiry later commissioned by the party into the Challenor scandal concluded that leadership had been more concerned with reputational damage and not being labeled “transphobic” than with developing a robust safeguarding policy. It also found that Aimee’s participation in an adult-baby fetish network had been deliberately covered up.

A similar pattern emerged with Melissa Poulton, a trans-identified man and 2023 Green parliamentary candidate. Poulton, a former Conservative who described himself as a “proud lesbian”, had a history of posting fetish material online, including disturbing references to children. When feminists in the party asked that he be placed on NFS, the standard measure used against women under investigation, the request was denied. Poulton was permitted to resign quietly.

Will Duckworth, once the party’s second most senior figure, faced allegations of sexual misconduct with children dating back to 2006. In December 2014, Party HQ received an email warning that it was “downright criminal” that he remained in public office, with access to young girls through his role as councillor. Yet no action was taken. He remained a Green councillor until 2016 and even stood as a parliamentary candidate in 2015. It was only in late 2018 — four years after the party had first been notified — that he was finally placed on no-fault suspension.

Far from prioritizing the safety of its members — especially women and young people — the party has developed a culture in which safeguarding structures are ignored, undermined, or actively weaponized against those who dissent from gender ideology.

The contradictions run deeper still. A party that proclaims itself anti-capitalist now champions two of capitalism’s most exploitative industries: prostitution and commercial surrogacy. Official policy, shaped largely by the LGBTIQA+ and Young Greens wings, frames same-sex couples, single people, older people, and even those “sex-averse” as “potentially deserving of surrogacy services”.

Once guided by second-wave feminism, the party now celebrates prostitution as “sex work”, treats surrogacy as a “right”, and enforces gender stereotypes as liberation. It is unclear on what basis the Feminist Greens use the word “feminist”, when their actions and campaigns fly in the face of all the evidence on decriminalization, and actively encourage harm to women.

“The party is dominated by luxury beliefs,” explains Jude English, former Green city councillor, and feminist and lesbian and gay rights activist, who served as co-chair of GPW at the beginning of 2024, until her expulsion shortly afterwards. The Greens, she says, are often perceived as “an upper middle class party that pays little attention to the working classes, and today that is, I am afraid, the case”.

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The trouble is, the public is unaware of the authoritarianism within the party walls. Polanski boasts an increased membership and takes the plaudits at conference. But “most Green Party voters have no idea this is happening”, says Eric Walker. “It only shows up in the Right-wing press.”

He has a point. The vast majority of the electorate, unless they reside in the woke enclaves of Bristol, or Brighton & Hove, have no idea about the dominant ideologies that have possessed the party. During this investigation, I attended hustings, and traveled to areas which had elected Green politicians, but although one or two told me they were aware of internal conflict over the transgender issue, they had no idea how pivotal it has become — and were certainly unaware of the mass expulsions and purges.

They will certainly have been wooed by Polanski’s conference manifesto of sweeping intent: all banning landlords, bringing down bills and freeing the NHS. But the Party also resolved to put human rights before personal and political responsibilities, aiming to mobilize “a diverse working class” to achieve a “radical liberation”. The emphasis, as ever, is on identity and ideology.

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