How Shahrar Ali beat the trans inquisition

There are trans ideologues in every UK political party, but they are especially prevalent on the rewilded fringes of the Greens.

Two years ago, former Green Party deputy leader Dr Shahrar Ali was sacked as the party’s spokesman for policing and domestic safety. His crime was to believe that biological sex is real and immutable. Today, a judge has ruled that he was dismissed unfairly – and that he was essentially the victim of a witch hunt.

Ali’s troubles began in 2020, when he posted a statement on X titled ‘What is a woman?’. ‘A woman is commonly defined as an adult human female and, genetically, typified by two XX chromosomes’, he wrote. ‘These facts are not in dispute [and] nor should they be in any political party.’ For stating these basic biological facts, Green Party apparatchiks accused him of ‘deliberately causing controversy’ and managed to have him removed from his post.

Ali then sued the Green Party of England and Wales for discrimination on the grounds of his gender-critical beliefs – beliefs that are protected under the Equality Act 2010. Today, the court found in his favour. It also found that his sacking was ‘procedurally unfair’ because the Green Party failed to identify what rules he had actually breached to warrant his dismissal.

What’s more, the mechanism used to fire Ali was highly questionable, too. At a meeting in June 2021, the party’s executive committee failed to secure enough votes to have him removed from his post. And so an entirely new deselection process was devised just in order to get rid of him.

Following the verdict, Ali has accused the Green Party of being ‘out of control’. ‘Parties are not beyond the law when it comes to seeking to discipline their representatives’, he said.

The ruling itself is subtle. It makes clear that it is not unlawful to remove someone from a position in a political party over a difference of beliefs. Indeed, the tribunal judge, Mr Justice Hellman, was careful to note that some discrimination on the basis of belief is necessary for political parties to function. But what parties cannot do, he said, is override their own rules and procedures just to target someone whose views they disagree with, especially when those views are protected in law.

Lawyers will undoubtedly be pawing through the pages of the judgement and taking notes, as several other cases are pending against the Green Party. Last month, Emma Bateman, the former co-chair of Green Party Women, revealed that she had been ‘expelled for a third time by the Green Party gender zealots’. She says she has ‘been vilified and traduced by Green Party members’, ever since she first started to question ‘whether a transwoman could really be female’. She also alleges that she has faced harassment from party higher-ups, ‘by being suspended and unsuspended in a game of cat and mouse’.

Meanwhile, Yorkshire Green Party parliamentary candidate Alison Teal has also said she’s ‘poised’ to take legal action. She has been suspended from the party for more than a year for her belief in basic biology.

It would be tempting to dismiss today’s ruling as irrelevant, and only of concern to a fringe political party. But the ramifications of this case will be felt far beyond the Greens. Lawyers for the Lib Dems, Labour and the Tories should pay close attention. Hopefully, it will make the trans activists pause before launching their next witch hunt.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.