Non-Binary Green Party Candidate Hopes to Offer Voters “Intersectional, Feminist Leadership”

A Green Party leadership candidate who first came to prominence as an environmental activist in the late 2010s will offer voters a “young, intersectional feminist political leadership” to “win the argument that there can be no climate justice without social justice.” 

As reported by Pink News, Tamsin Omond, who identifies as trans and non-binary, will run alongside current Greens deputy leader Amelia Womack for co-leadership of the party. 

The move comes following the resignation of former co-leader Siân Berry, who quit the party in July after facing backlash over the Greens’ “failure” to reflect the inclusive attitudes of “our membership and wider society.” The party had previously selected politician Shahrar Ali, who argued that “adult human females” were “genetically typified by two XX chromosomes,” as the spokesperson for policing and domestic safety.

Speaking to Pink News, Omond, a co-founder of the “extremist” environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion, said that Berry’s resignation made way for a new, “anti-transphobic” Green Party.

“I can quite confidently say that what the Green Party wants now is for its leadership to be anti-transphobic. What the country needs is a Green Party that is championing trans rights, that is standing firmly on the right side of history, and acting as a signpost towards a more inclusive future, a greener future, a future that includes the voices and solutions that are created within communities who are marginalised and oppressed - because we are the people who have lived impossible lives.”

In 2011, Omond and other members of the environmental pressure group Plane Stupid were arrested after they climbed onto the roof of the Palace of Westminster to protest the planned addition of a third runway to Heathrow Airport. In 2012, Omond’s rhetoric during a protest at Biggin Hill Airport proved controversial within the group when the Green Party hopeful told fellow activists to “grow up” while asserting: “I know the green brand is unwashed, unshaven and up a tree. That doesn't represent me.”

The granddaughter of 4th Baronet Sir Thomas Edward Lees, Omond was raised in North London and was educated at the prestigious Westminster School before attending Trinity College, Cambridge. Writing a rebuttal piece for the Daily Mail in 2011 after being labelled the third “most powerful posh people under 30,” Omond indicated that trips as an adolescent to the familial estate in Dorset took place “every weekend.” 

“We would go to the countryside every weekend, which was definitely a privilege for a city child. We would hang out on my uncle's farm with my cousins and leave our wet socks to dry by the Aga. These were the posh weekends with my extended family. My brothers would be taken out shooting (the poor boys were useless - the eldest is a pacifist vegetarian) while I would sit in the kitchen and read Jane Austen. When I walked to the village, swinging in between Gran and Grandad, the elderly people we passed would nod and say: 'Morning, milord, milady.' I remember feeling proud, not realising that there would come a time when I would bridle at being called posh.”