Open discussion in the Green Party is in short supply. Let's change that. Join me on 3 October in Brighton for a series of seminars on some of the most challenging issues facing us today, including unlawful belief discrimination, antisemitism and Islamism, eco-populism and the climate emergency. With a closing session led by special guests Green Women's Declaration. ♀️ @GWDeclaration Free. Limited places. Register here: electshahrar.co.uk/the-futur…

A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures. The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019. A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years. Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture. The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment. Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls. "Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded. Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls. The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges. The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway. How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?

.@TheGreenParty conference motion 'Strengthening the Equality Act' includes wrecking the category of sex, adding Gender Identity, Menopause, Social Class and a ludicrous crack down on challenging, criticising or even disagreeing with any of the protected characteristics.

What Nadia Whittome is proposing is changing the Equality Act to an Australian-style model, where men have all the rights and women have none. We have already seen the consequences of conflicts over that approach in the Sall Grover case. At some point we have to be prepared to say something very simple: there are limitations to identifying as the opposite sex. Identity cannot give someone an unlimited right of access to the opposite sex's spaces. Not the changing room your daughter uses. Not the female ward where your confused elderly mother is at her most vulnerable. Not rape crisis services. Not female prisons. Not female psychiatric wards. Why have we spent years finding it almost unthinkable to say that someone may identify as they wish, but there are boundaries to what that identity can require of everybody else? Women should not lose their boundaries because somebody else identifies across them. State the boundaries and stop dismantling women's sex-based rights in an attempt to pretend there are no limitations to identity.