Women can rest easy. The Green Party of England and Wales wants to tackle the scourge of misogyny, and its leader, Zack Polanski, even has a plan. Okay, so it doesn’t cover rape, murder, grooming gangs or domestic violence. But why quibble? Polanski has something far more serious in mind: the terrible problem of men disagreeing with women and pointing out when they get something wrong. Under plans being considered by party higher-ups, men who engage in such outrageous practices could soon face disciplinary action.
A dossier produced by the Green Party’s lawyers and leaked to the Telegraph reveals party leaders are considering a broader definition of misogyny and harsher punishments for those who overstep the mark. The report highlights a proposed addition to the party’s ethics framework, titled ‘Guidance on Identifying Misogyny and Sexism’, which lists ‘being corrected’ as an example of supposedly misogynistic behaviour that women can experience. The Greens’ lawyers warn that this makes the guidance so broad that ‘any disagreement’ between the sexes could lead to the man facing sanctions. Because women are never wrong, right?
What patronising twaddle. The Green Party’s proposal implies that women are so fragile that they cannot cope with the cut and thrust of political debate, and so sensitive that they cannot handle criticism. Unlike men, who can take disagreements on the chin and get stuck into arguments, women are seen as delicate little flowers who must never be criticised, corrected or interrupted. Talk about sexism…
Of course, it’s not just the Green Party breaking out in hives at the prospect that women in politics might face disagreements. In the run-up to the budget, chancellor Rachel Reeves complained that criticism of her was sexist. She told The Times that she was ‘sick of people mansplaining how to be chancellor’, and that it was exhausting having to demonstrate her ability to ‘boys who now write newspaper columns’ and call her ‘Rachel from Accounts’. Reeves genuinely seems to believe that critics attack her simply because she is a woman, and not because she is economically illiterate and entirely unfamiliar with the concept of truth. Bless.
The prime minister has joined in, too. Angela Rayner’s downfall, Keir Starmer has suggested, was a result of misogyny. So, nothing whatsoever to do with her failure to pay the correct taxes when she bought a new house, then? We can’t blame women if they fail to keep track of such details!
It is simply not true that misogyny is ruining women’s political careers. If anything, the opposite is the case and women, particularly in the Labour Party, are afforded special treatment. Labour has made extensive use of all-women shortlists for selecting parliamentary candidates. Indeed, Rachel Reeves was chosen to represent her Leeds constituency from just such a list. And since taking a seat in the cabinet, Reeves has made being the first female chancellor of the exchequer central to her identity. Perhaps if she had been treated more robustly and had been forced to confront disagreements earlier in her career, Reeves would now be better at her job and not have to cry ‘misogyny’ when her weaknesses are exposed.
The ‘m’ word is thrown around like confetti nowadays. In our victim culture, mere ‘sexism’ is never enough. Everything must be branded ‘misogyny’ – a hatred of women – even, according to the Green Party, disagreement. It is easy to poke fun at such inflated rhetoric, but there is a serious side to this abuse of language. When ‘misogyny’ is everywhere, it becomes trivialised. While we obsess over ‘mansplaining’, the real erasure of women’s rights passes without comment.
There is at least one place where misogyny really does exist today: the movement for trans rights. The bonkers notion that men can be women just by sporting a bit of lippy undermines women’s sex-based rights. Few things are more misogynistic than journalists and lawyers referring to rapists as ‘she’ and expecting victims of assault to say ‘her penis’, or encouraging vulnerable girls to pump themselves full of hormones and cut off their breasts. When it comes to politics, all-women shortlists are a terrible idea. But if they are going to be employed, they should at least be the preserve of actual women, not men who say they are women.
Yet the Green Party, for all its talk of tackling misogyny, has thrown its weight behind transgender activism. Polanski refuses to accept the Supreme Court’s judgment that ‘sex’ refers to biological sex and a woman is a biological woman, branding this statement of the obvious ‘thinly veiled transphobia’. During his leadership campaign, Polanski insisted the Green Party needed to ‘stand firm’ on policies including gender self-identification, which would allow transgender people to instantly obtain a gender-recognition certificate and, for all legal purposes, merely affirm their own gender. So when the Green Party talks about wanting to protect women from disagreement, it also means the delicate little flowers who are six-foot-three and have a five o’clock shadow and a pronounced Adam’s apple.
If Zack Polanski wants to confront misogyny, he should start by looking in a mirror. He will see a snake-oil salesman who offered to hypnotise women to increase the size of their breasts, a patronising fool who thinks women can’t cope with being interrupted, and a mad activist who believes in sacrificing women’s rights for the titillation of men in dresses. Women need the Green Party like a fish needs a bicycle.
Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.
