James Kirkup James Kirkup

How Caroline Lucas fell foul of the transgender thought police | 4 September 2018

Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being that most terrible thing, a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is being punished accordingly.

Lucas leads a party that is deeply devoted to the orthodoxy of transgenderism and the unquestionable mantra that “transwomen are women”. So keen are Greens to embrace the right of people born male to be considered women if they say they are women that they sometimes seem to want to remove the word “women” from their vocabulary: “non-men” is the term some Greens use.

Yet Lucas is now on the pyre, facing online chastisement for crimes against transgenderism. She’s a Terf! Burn her!

Or rather, Block Her! For this is a story partly about Twitter, where too much of the political conversation around gender takes place. It’s also about some truly horrible sexual offences and the Greens’ woeful mishandling of the questions that arise from them. And it’s a story that says a great deal, none of it good, about the politics of the transgender “debate”.

Aimee Challenor was a prominent Green activist. She was the party’s spokesperson on equalities issues and a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership. Aimee Challenor was a Green candidate in the 2017 general election and the 2018 local government elections. In both elections, her election agent was her father, David “Baloo” Challenor.

David Challenor was last month convicted of torturing and raping a ten-year old girl in the attic of the family home. He was charged with those crimes in 2016. So Aimee Challenor was nominated for public office for the Green Party by a man awaiting trial for the most serious sexual offences against a child.

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