Founding Statement for the
Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights
We are the women and men of the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. Some of us belong to state parties of the Green Party of the US; some of us have felt driven from a Green Party which has failed to live up to its self-professed values. We will provide a home to still others who have not previously participated with the Green Party but now find themselves politically homeless and ready for independent political action consistent with Green and feminist values. We intend to build on the thoughtful policy work captured as the Platform of the Green Party of the United States, avoiding its recent detours from its core feminist values including its statement about “self-determination of sex.” We reject the actions and practices by which the national Green Party has cast aside the founding values of Feminism, Nonviolence, Grassroots Democracy, Decentralization, and Respect for Diversity. We find democratic functioning and respect for due process key to building a politics worthy of our energies.
We exist to build a political movement consistent with the Ten Key Values as traditionally understood by Greens in the United States, before the infection of postmodernism1. We are also committed to electoral engagement independent of the corporate duopoly2, to building and strengthening state-based political parties and contesting for state power through the electoral process. We believe that a Green politics, grounded in material reality, can express majoritarian views worthy of support by the U.S. electorate.
We endorse the Declaration on Women's Sex Based Rights. [[ sign statement * local copy * source copy ]]
Women, adult human females, are oppressed on the basis of sex by the system of male supremacy, and our female biology is used by the patriarchy to oppress us. Biological sex is both binary and immutable. Gender is a social construct. We support women's sex-based rights, including the right to create and maintain female-only spaces, programs and organizations including but not limited to shelters for homeless or battered women, rape crisis centers, transitional housing, prisons, bathrooms, changing rooms, spas, affirmative action/female set-asides, girls' and women's sports teams, and female-only groups and caucuses
No one is born in the ‘wrong’ body. We support gender nonconformity. We oppose the social and medical ‘transitioning’ of minors. We would protect young people from exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry which is marketing powerful off-label drugs directly to them, absent informed consent, and too often over parental objection. This industry pathologizes psychological distress of puberty which leads so many minors to feel dissociated from their bodies. Young people should not be pathologized because they reject sex stereotyping and the sexist and heterosexist limitations imposed on them. We understand that the vast majority of trans-identified minors, if protected from medical interventions, will come to accept their natal bodies and are highly likely to grow up to be healthy gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults.
Children and minors must be protected from claims that they can give informed consent to irreversible experimental life-changing elective procedures with long-term negative health consequences, including undeveloped secondary sex characteristics, sterility, loss of sexual function and bone and brain underdevelopment. The absence of longitudinal data leaves medical professionals unable to predict all of the adverse life-long outcomes which might be expected of ‘gender-affirming’ medical intervention, including mutilating surgeries and chemical castration.
Sex discrimination against women and girls and sex stereotyping that harms both sexes must end. All men and women should be free to dress, express themselves, and to pursue vocations and interests they prefer regardless of sex, free from discrimination, stigma and violence, whether such individuals identify as transgender or not.
Sex-based rights include the right of women and girls to control their bodies, sexuality, and reproductive capacities free from coercion and exploitation, including freedom from all forms of male violence, unimpeded access to birth control and abortion, the abolition of commercial surrogacy, as well as the abolition of prostitution -- by way of the Nordic model3. We oppose the objectification of women and the filmed abuse of our sisters and daughters in pornography, while we support protecting and healing our brothers and sons from this hateful propaganda, and their sisters who are growing up in a pornified culture.
Sex-based rights also include the rights of lesbian and gay people, and the protection of advances which have been achieved so far, including same-sex marriage. We support full legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation on a national level. People have the right to declare and have respected their sexual orientation. We are particularly concerned with the rape culture narrative of the “cotton ceiling”4 that targets lesbians.
Patriarchal gender stereotypes are promoted by right-wing and neoliberal political cultures alike. No matter the source, we reject those gendered stereotypes as anathema to the feminist values we organize to advance. We reject the guilt-by-association logical fallacies being used to silence concerns over the issues raised above within politically progressive communities. We are committed to examining the evidence and evaluating these issues based on Green values, unconstrained by the ideological positions of our political opposition, on the left or the right.
We exist to restore integrity and genuine feminism to Green and independent Left organizing in this nation. We welcome others who share our commitments to join us in this effort.
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1 Postmodernism is a strain of academic thought which posits that language shapes, rather than describes reality, and that all conflict is about power and that language is the terrain on which these struggles are engaged. It serves as the intellectual framework on which the excesses of identity politics has grown, supplanting a class analysis of economic relations. See e.g.
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/postmodernism-the-joke-is-on-soci…
2 The corporate duopoly is a phrase used to discuss the bi-partisan collusion on behalf of corporate interests by Democrats and Republicans. The phrase was often used by Ralph Nader during his 1996 and 2000 presidential runs as a Green candidate, and has been widely adopted among Greens since then to describe our political opposition and their loyalty to monied interests over the concerns of actual voters.
3 The Nordic Model was endorsed by amendments advocated by the National Women’s Caucus to the Platform of the Green Party of the United States adopted in 2004, when it was still known as the Swedish Model. This model advocated the criminalization of pimps and panderers and the decriminalization of those mostly women whom they prostitute, providing them with resources sufficient to exit this exploitative industry.
4 The term “cotton ceiling” refers to the ‘barrier’ (cotton panties of lesbians) heterosexually-inclined trans-identified males face when denied access to sex with lesbians–females who are exclusively same-sex attracted. This ‘barrier’ is seen as denying their validity as ‘lesbians’, as a sexual experience with a lesbian is viewed as the ultimate affirmation of themselves as the
women they claim to be. As a result, lesbians are experiencing huge pressure within ‘LGBTQ’ communities and on lesbian dating sites, to accept as fact the mantra ‘trans women are women’, and thus to accept penis in their sexual lives. Lesbians who responded to a recent survey reported being subjected to a wide variety of harassment and sexual violence by these men, and have described their experiences as ‘corrective rape’, ‘conversion therapy’, and compelled/coerced heterosexuality.
http://www.gettheloutuk.com/blog/category/research/lesbians-at-ground-z…
https://terfisaslur.com/cotton-ceiling/