Darren Johnsom seems to have been one of the rare Green Party members who wasn't deranged - so they threw him out. The party, he believes, has been taken over by trans ideology: their dismissal of the Cass Report was the final straw.
He writes about it in the Telegraph:
In the Scottish Parliament Green MSPs now stand completely isolated on the Cass findings. Their co-leader, Patrick Harvie, was reluctant to even accept the report as a valid scientific document.
In London, Zoë Garbett, the Green mayoral candidate last month (who now sits as a London Assembly Member after her predecessor resigned her seat just days after getting elected) joined Harvie in attempting to undermine the findings. Apparently without even a pause for reflection over the monstrous way vulnerable young people had been let down by the NHS, she put out an upbeat and bouncy but completely nonsensical video dismissing the Cass Review as “really worrying” and saying that while “it’s widely recognised there are problems with trans healthcare, this review does not speak to the heart of those.”
This casual dismissal of such a landmark report was absolutely gut-wrenching for me. I had twice stood as the Green Party’s candidate for mayor of London and spent 16 years representing the Greens as a London assembly member. Throughout that time, children’s health featured high on my list of priorities, whether it was pushing for tough measures on air pollution or fighting for better homes for families living in overcrowded conditions. How dare leading Greens be so dismissive of a well-researched, scientific review tackling a shameful medical scandal.
I reacted with fury. “Vote Green if you want to completely ignore medical evidence and see more children pumped full of harmful drugs.” I wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to that awful, glib video from Garbett.
I knew at the time it would put my 37-year membership of the party in jeopardy. Numerous women in the party have already been suspended or expelled but I was not going to sit back and stay silent while leading members of the Green Party went out of their way to rubbish the Cass Review. The Green Party has also accused me, erroneously, of endorsing the Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion. I have not, although I will admit to calling some of my erstwhile colleagues “science-denying loons”. Well, if the cap fits.
I am beyond despair that the political party I’ve been a member of for decades, that has always said “trust the science” when it comes to climate change or air and river pollution, is apparently putting ideology before science when it comes to pushing untested medical treatments for children.
By suspending me this week, the Green Party perhaps hopes it can bully me into silence in the run-up to the general election. They will not succeed. Whether they decide to lift the “temporary suspension” they have slapped on me or expel me on a more permanent basis, I will not stop speaking out on this grotesque medical scandal that has harmed many vulnerable young people and harmed the credibility of the political movement I’ve spent most of my life fighting for.
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