Does the Green party care more about trans rights than the environment?

Our planet is in a mess. Ice caps are melting and the glaciers are retreating. This summer in Canada, the mercury has already broken through 49 degrees Celsius, with August still ahead of us. Climate change worries me, and I think it should worry others too. But despite the party’s name, the Green party isn’t devoting its full attention to this issue. Instead, some of its members are preoccupied with rooting out alleged transphobia within the party.

This week, co-leader Sian Berry announced that she was standing down over ‘inconsistencies’ within the party. Her statement didn’t name names, and was probably baffling to the ordinary voter, but the cause of her discomfort was easy to read between the lines.

Former Green party deputy leader Shahrar Ali posed a question last summer which most people would think to be fairly inane. ‘What is a woman?’, he asked. But his response – that ‘a woman is commonly defined as an adult human female and, genetically, typified by two XX chromosomes’ – sparked uproar within a party that is tearing itself to bits in its doomed attempt to appease the trans lobby.