Green Co-Leader Gender Debate

I’ve blogged a couple of times that the requirement in the Greens constitution for their two co-leaders to be opposite genders seems to be causing more problems than it solves, and why would you have such a requirement?

Frog Blog has entered the debate, and generated a lively thread. There’s a good mixture of comments there.

Frog says that “gender is the most fundamental *difference* between people and a key physical identifier that everybody shares.” I say this is bollocks and part of the left’s problem that they see people as part of a group, rather than individuals.

Richard from Philosophy etc makes the excellent point that “Gender is not the most fundamental difference between people. I share a lot more in common with a well-educated female philosophy student than I do a senile fundamentalist male.”

He concludes that what the Greens need is “With the loss of Rod, you need another pragmatist, not another penis”

Richard also goes on to say that asserting that gender is a fundamental difference between people, is the sort of prejudging of individuals which 120 years ago was used to justify not giving women the vote!

To use a bloggers example of this gender co-leadership requirement, let us imagine all the bloggers were a party, and we wanted two co-leaders who complemented each other, rather than were similar to each other.

Well under the gender requirement you might have Cathy Odgers and Insolent Prick as co-leaders. One would not be allowed to have Spanner and Cathy Odgers [previously said IP by mistake] despite the fact they would be more complementary.