By Chip Le Grand and Broede Carmody
At 4.14am on April 21, about six hours after the state council of the Victorian Greens formally adopted a new definition of transphobia, Bianca Haven posted a typically provocative tweet: “I have finally won the war on women.”
Like much of what Haven says through her various online personas, the comment was intended as satirical and incendiary. As a self-described “shitposter”, the 26-year-old trans activist’s stock in trade is provocation. She might not really think a war is raging at all – she just wants to get up the nose of people who do.
Greens member Bianca Haven, left, leader Samantha Ratnam and unionist Linda Gale.Credit: The Age
Confused? Women who have long supported the Greens for their stance on the climate and asylum seekers certainly are, seeing the party’s transphobia policy as in conflict with their own rights and identity.
How the Greens arrived at a place where, arguably, discussion of sex-based rights is forbidden, is a complex and heavily contested story in which Haven can be found at both the start and the end.
In February, Haven was censured by the Greens for posting repugnant material, including defending paedophilia and incest. One of her private accounts carries a warning that it contains sexual fantasies involving non-consent. Two months later, she was chosen by branch members to champion the new transphobia provision which, according to Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, “will ensure our party remains a safe and welcoming space for all”.
The origins of this provision can be found nearly five years earlier, when Haven along with fellow Greens member and local government councillor Ben Ramcharan first proposed to state council, the party’s governing body, that transphobia was a growing problem within the party and it needed to adopt a “no-tolerance for trans-exclusionary hate speech”.
Their twin proposals, submitted shortly after the 2018 state election, listed examples of trans-exclusionary speech. These included claiming there are two sexes, that trans women are biologically male, that trans issues are an active debate in feminism, that shutting down debate is censorship, that gender identity erases women or that trans women don’t get periods.
“While trans women do not properly menstruate, there are other aspects of periods, such as mood swings and cramps, that some trans women do experience, for reasons that have not yet been adequately studied,” the proposal claimed without citation.
Although the 2018 proposal was not approved by state council, it set in train a sequence of events that split the Greens and triggered an ongoing purge of gender-critical feminists, more commonly known as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), from the party. This culminated in last week’s vote at state council, where a more-considered proposal developed by the Queer Greens group and submitted by Haven on behalf of branch members was overwhelmingly endorsed.
The supporting material attached to this latest proposal flatly stated that the Victorian Greens had a transphobia problem. “Trans members have repeatedly described this problem for years,” the material read. “The only people who deny the problem are those who do not yet understand the problem, and those who are invested in denying it in order to cover for their own transphobic views.”
If taken as read, this offered state council members three choices; to be supportive, ignorant or bigoted. The council meeting started at 7pm and by 10pm, the final vote showed 10 members in favour and only three against; all veteran figures in the Greens who favoured a less- proscriptive approach.
A new anti-discrimination provision inserted into the party’s code of conduct defines transphobia as doing something that “harms or seriously risks harming trans people as a group by virtue of being trans” and proscribes as examples: vilifying trans people; discriminating against trans people; attempting to curtail the rights of trans people; intentionally misgendering trans people individually or as a group; denying that non-binary genders exist; promoting the unnecessary prioritisation of sex characteristics above gender; advocating for conversion practices; advocating for unnecessary restrictions on transition care; and, asking leading questions that cover for doing one of the above.
Greens members found to have breached the provision face censure, suspension or expulsion.
The Victorian Greens definition of transphobia is substantially more expansive than that provided for other forms of discrimination proscribed by the code of conduct. A long-serving party member, speaking anonymously to discuss internal party matters, said this was in response to confusion expressed by people across the Greens, both trans and non-trans, about what transphobia was.
“We wanted to make sure that we clearly set the boundaries for what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour for party members,” he said. “I think we have shown we can have healthy debate within the party on these particular issues, but that has to be done within a framework of respect.”
Two of the party’s parliamentary leaders, Victorian leader Samantha Ratnam and Senator Janet Rice, lobbied hard for the new definition. Ratnam on Friday described it as a line in the sand. “Debates are an important part of our society but as a community, we must draw a line in the sand when it comes to legitimising vilification or hate,” she said.
Linda Gale, one of about 50 observers in the Zoom meeting when the new definition was adopted, never imagined she’d be cast on the wrong sign of that line.
Gale is a senior officer with the National Tertiary Education Union and a socialist feminist who had been a Greens member for about 13 years. She has spent the past five years locked in an increasingly rancorous battle with trans rights activists and her party’s leadership over how the Greens should support trans women without eroding the rights and identity of biological females.
She has twice been cleared by the party’s normal internal disciplinary processes of allegations of transphobia levelled at her by other party members. Her nomination last year for the position of party co-convenor set off a firestorm before Ratnam intervened to scuttle her nomination. Now, she and City of Melbourne Greens councillor Rohan Leppert are in the sights of an extraordinary panel of inquiry specially convened to eliminate transphobia from the party.
Leppert, Gale and Haven all declined to comment for this story.
Leppert has previously defended his record of supporting trans people. “But I cannot apologise for my thoughts, my beliefs, and for engaging in debate within my party,” he said last year. “I don’t believe that sex and gender is a special category of policy not allowed to be discussed. Gender affects all of us.”
In the lead-up to last week’s council vote on the transphobia position, Gale made clear her concerns on Greens Ideas, an internal party forum, about where the Greens were heading. “It has been repeatedly asserted that there is no conflict between the rights of trans people and the rights of women, and that to suggest otherwise is inherently transphobic. This is nonsense.
“Human rights come into conflict all the time. It is silly to pretend that they do not and outrageous to suggest that it is inherently transphobic to raise the existence of such conflicts. The purpose of understanding the points of conflict is to find ways to resolve them, not to exclude any particular group from access to rights. But in the Greens, this discussion is announced as trans exclusionary.”
Gale’s original sin, committed in partnership with Nina Vallins, a former Greens member who has since quit the party, was to co-author a rebuttal to Haven and Ramcharan’s 2018 proposal, which they said aimed to shut down debate on a critical issue in feminism and women’s rights. At the time, Gale and Vallins were both members of the party’s state executive.
Their paper noted that feminists had fought hard for freedom from male violence, reproductive rights and equality in education, the workplace and politics. “If ‘woman’ is a category predicated entirely on a person’s subjective self-identification rather than an objective, identifiable fact such as biology, what are the policy and practical implications for these hard-won sex-segregated spaces or sex-affirmative actions?” they questioned.
In a rhetorical flourish which outraged some in the party, including the parliamentary leadership, the two women asked: “Is it OK for lesbian women to prefer that their sexual partners have female anatomy, is this transphobic and should they be encouraged to welcome sexual relationships with people with penises who identify as women?” Senator Rice publicly called for Gale to recant what she had written and apologise for it.
Lawyer Nina Vallins.Credit: Darrian Traynor
Vallins is a feminist lawyer who previously worked with women in the sex industry and now specialises in child sex abuse cases. She first became involved with the Greens 16 years ago, when she volunteered on Adam Bandt’s 2007 campaign.
“I had a sense that the Greens were going to be hard-lined against radical feminists but I still thought we would be able to have discussions about it in the party,” she explained this week. “That has not played out at all. Instead, battles were played out on social media. There was a lot of vitriol about Linda and myself, targeting senior members of the party. I think we saw the elected representatives of the party abusing their power in ways that had previously not been feasible.
“The Greens have more members of parliament than they have ever had before but at the same time the administration of the party has, I think, been completely debased. You can’t have a healthy, functioning political party where people can’t debate politics.”
In late 2019, Vallins was suspended from the Greens for six months for vilifying party members and volunteers on the basis of their gender identity and bringing the party into disrepute. Since then, her concerns about the trans rights movement, and what she sees as inherent misogyny in denying the biological basis of being a woman, have further deepened. Two months ago, she attended the Let Women Speak rally on the steps of parliament gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Several party figures said the scenes that unfolded on the steps of parliament, where a speech by visiting women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen, a figure reviled by trans communities here and in Britain, was punctuated by black-clad Neo Nazis performing a Hitler salute, galvanised the Victorian Greens to finally adopt the new transphobia policy.
A senior Greens figure, speaking anonymously to discuss internal party matters, said the rally clearly demonstrated how the trans community were being scapegoated by far-right politics, including Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and that the Greens needed to pick a side.
“That anti-trans and Nazi rally was a watershed moment,” the party figure said. “When Hanson hated on the Asians, the Greens stood with the Asians. When Hanson hated on the Muslims, we stood with the Muslims, when she was hating on gay couples we stood with gay couples. She is hating on the trans community and we are going to stand with the trans community.”
The party figure agrees that the new provision further restricts free speech within the Greens but points out that freedom of speech has never been a core value of the party. “We are not a libertarian party,” they said. A survey conducted as part of the ABC’s “Australia Talks” series suggests that most Greens voters would agree.
The online survey of nearly 55,000 respondents, found that nine in 10 Greens voters agree that there are more than two genders, that people should be referred to by the gender they identify with, and only 29 per cent of voters believes that you should be able to say things that offend other people. Nearly all Greens voters surveyed – 97 per cent – agreed that freedom of speech was often used to justify discrimination against minority groups.
The survey, combined with the lopsided nature of the state council vote and largely muted response to the new policy, suggests the Greens are unlikely to face an exodus of supporters over this issue. As pollster Jim Reed from Resolve Strategic observes, “we often find that this sort of issue is very important to a small minority of voters one way or another, but doesn’t really register with others. Most people would still regard it as a side issue and perhaps even a distraction from things like the climate or cost of living.”
It is less clear what impact the new transphobia definition will have inside a party riven with grievance. Half of the current state council face re-election on June 30.
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