For­mer tem­po­rary sen­a­tor Jow­elle De Souza re­signed from the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), cit­ing con­cerns over the par­ty’s lead­er­ship and what she de­scribed as a lack of com­mit­ment to mean­ing­ful ad­vo­ca­cy.

Her de­par­ture comes just weeks af­ter she pub­licly de­fend­ed Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who had crit­i­cised what she called U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s “woke lib­er­al agen­das,” par­tic­u­lar­ly poli­cies on gen­der re­as­sign­ment surg­eries for mi­nors. De Souza, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s first trans­gen­der sen­a­tor, sup­port­ed Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s stance, stress­ing the need for psy­chi­atric sup­port be­fore chil­dren make ir­re­versible med­ical de­ci­sions.

De­spite that re­cent de­fence of the UNC leader, De Souza now says the par­ty has no room for her or oth­ers who ques­tion its di­rec­tion. In a res­ig­na­tion let­ter made pub­lic, she said she ini­tial­ly ac­cept­ed her Sen­ate ap­point­ment be­liev­ing she would be able to push for key is­sues, in­clud­ing an­i­mal rights and con­cerns af­fect­ing San Fer­nan­do. How­ev­er, she wrote that it soon be­came clear that her ap­point­ment was not about “gen­uine ad­vo­ca­cy” but rather a po­lit­i­cal ma­noeu­vre in­tend­ed to dis­tract from the ap­point­ment of PNM sen­a­tor, Richie Sookhai.

“Since my tenure in the Sen­ate, no fur­ther dis­cus­sions have tak­en place re­gard­ing these is­sues, and there has been no in­di­ca­tion from the lead­er­ship that they were ever tru­ly on the agen­da,” she wrote.

She al­so ac­cused the par­ty’s lead­er­ship of dis­miss­ing and dis­re­gard­ing in­ter­nal dis­sent rather than ad­dress­ing valid con­cerns from sup­port­ers. De Souza com­pared the UNC’s ap­proach to Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley’s con­tro­ver­sial re­mark that dis­sat­is­fied cit­i­zens should leave the coun­try.