‘Trans Non-Binary’ Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion Running for Leader of Green Party

TOPSHOT - Activists from the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion, dressed in
BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

A person identifying as both transgender and non-binary simultaneously is running on a co-leadership ticket for the Green Party of England and Wales.

Tamsin Omond, who uses the pronoun “they/them”, is running on a joint ticket with Amelia Womack, both 36, and is claiming to offer British voters “young intersectional feminist leadership” focused on the green agenda.

“Young people are coming into their own, in political agency, on these issues,” Omond told The Guardian on Thursday.

Omond claimed in a Twitter video announcing Omond’s and Ms Womack’s co-leadership bid that “there can be no climate justice without social justice,” with Womack adding that under their leadership they would work to “win trans liberation and racial justice”.

Omond is a co-founder of the eco-fanatic Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose activists work tirelessly to bring cities like London to a standstill in protest over alleged manmade climate change. The group recently pledged to disrupt the city indefinitely until its demands are met.

The 36-year-old activist has a first-class honours degree from Cambridge University and is the grandchild of wealthy landowner and fourth-generation Dorset baronet, Sir Thomas Lees. According to a Telegraph report from 2008, Omond had considered training as a priest.

In 2009, the eco-warrior was listed by The Times as one of the “top 30 power players under 30” — named alongside figures such as Prince William, Emma Watson, and Lewis Hamilton — with the newspaper describing Omond as “gorgeous, intelligent and committed”.

The Guardian explained that under the constitution of the Green Party, which only has one MP in the House of Commons, leadership is open to single candidates or two co-leaders, but there are rules on sex, such that co-leaders must be “of different genders”.

The liberal-progressive newspaper said that the party’s standing order committee is due to rule on whether the composition of Ms Womack and the trans, non-binary Omond fall within the criteria.

Questions of gender recently contributed to the end of the previous Green Party leadership, when following the resignation of co-leader Jonathan Barley, co-leader Sîan Berry resigned less than a fortnight later, as a result of internal party conflict over transgender rights.

According to Green Party contacts speaking to the media last month, Berry had resigned over the appointment of Shahrar Ali as the party spokesman for policing and public safety. Ali had published a statement in July 2020 defining a woman as “an adult human female, and, genetically, typified by two XX chromosomes” — a so-called ‘gender-critical view’, often labelled by transgender activists to be transphobic.

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