UK Greens (Meaning Radical Leftists) Reject Language of Mother and Father, as We Should Reject Them
The UK Green Party has decided that "mother" and "father" are the wrong words for the people who are, in the ordinary case, a child's mother and father. Members have been told to say "parents and carers" instead, and warned that the wrong vocabulary can make a room feel unwelcoming, which the party treats as a step toward bullying and a breach of its code of conduct. This is not a style note. It is a rule about what a member is allowed to call a parent, backed by the threat of sanction.
The guidance, reported by the Telegraph and picked up by the Daily Sceptic on October 1, sits in a longer list. Do not say "elderly." Use "black, Asian and minority ethnic" only with caution, because many people dislike being folded into one label. Avoid "homosexual" and "transsexual," the latter because it leaves out non-binary people. "Sexual preference" is unacceptable because it implies attraction is a choice. "Lunatic" and "nutter" reinforce stigma. J.K. Rowling's reply, that she is an elderly mother of three, has not had a sex change, knows many homosexuals, and thinks the Greens are turning into nutters, used almost every banned word on purpose. The joke works because the list is not about precision. It is about who holds the glossary.
Grant the premise the party wants granted. Suppose sex is not simply observed, and suppose a person may identify out of the sex they were born in, and that politeness requires others to play along. Nothing in that premise reaches "mother" and "father." Those words name a relation, not a costume. A mother is the female parent. A father is the male parent. Most children have one of each. Some have two mothers, or two fathers, or a parent and a carer, or one parent only. English already has words for those arrangements. "Parents and carers" are one of them. It is a useful general term when the relation is unknown or mixed. It is a worse term when the relation is known, because it throws away the information. A birth register, a medical history, a school form asking who carried the child: these are not improved by pretending the distinction is rude.
The inconsistency is inside the party's own rule. Identity, on the account it has adopted, is to be affirmed as declared. A man who identifies as a woman is to be called a woman, and refusal is exclusion. A woman who identifies as a mother, who in fact is one, is to have that word retired, and use of it is the exclusion. The same code cannot say that self-description is sacred and that the most common self-description in the species is unacceptable. If a person may choose the words for their sex, a person may choose the words for their parenthood. The Greens are not offering that choice. They are withdrawing the ordinary words and substituting a committee word, then calling the substitution inclusion.
Look at the other entries and the principle reverses itself twice. "Sexual preference" is banned because it suggests attraction is chosen. Parental sex, under the new guidance, is treated as the thing that must not be specified, as if mother and father were preferences rather than descriptions. "Bame" is to be used cautiously because diverse experiences should not be forced under a single label. Mother and father are then forced under "parents and carers," which is a single label designed to erase the difference the party elsewhere claims to honour. Non-binary people are invoked to retire "transsexual." The far larger class of people who are mothers and fathers is not invoked at all, except as a problem the language has to route around.
None of this is required by the existence of trans-identified parents. A trans-identified man who has fathered a child is a father, or, if he rejects the word, he can ask for another in his own case. That is a request about one person. A party rule that members should not say "mothers and fathers" is a request about everyone else. It makes the exception into the standard and the standard into a conduct offence. Inclusion that cannot share a sentence with the majority's accurate name is not inclusion. It is a claim that the majority's name was the offence.
The party issuing the rule has also changed shape. Membership went from about 68,000 in September 2025 to 200,000 by March 2026, after Zack Polanski's election and an influx of activists who left Labour for a Greens more interested in Palestinian and transgender causes than in emissions. A language code is what a party writes when it is managing that coalition. The environment does not care whether a leaflet says mother. The code does, because the code is how the new membership recognises itself. A party that will sanction a member for saying father, and will not sanction the logic that forbids it, has stopped arguing about words and started policing which identities count. Traditional ones, on this list, do not.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/01/mother-and-father-is-unacceptable-language-says-green-party/
