Trans debate hijacked by leftist fringe

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker) is escorted from Auckland’s Albert Park as trans-rights supporters attempt to attack her. Picture: Dean Purcell

Like many Australians, this column had never heard of Posie Parker until a fortnight ago.

It has no problem with trans people, has had trans friends for many years and has no desire to make life more difficult for people struggling with identity issues.

Much like this newspaper, this column supports personal freedom. And like many Australian parents, this column has a gay son more than capable of standing up for himself.

With a Jewish daughter living in Tel Aviv, this column abhors the evils of Nazism and the fools using Nazi salutes at public rallies, as happened at Parker’s Melbourne rally in favour of women’s rights on March 18.

It is hard not to feel sympathy for Parker, real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who was preposterously misrepresented by much of the media during her trip to Australia and New Zealand.

Her appearances were marred in both countries by abusive and sometimes violent protests by LGBTQI activists claiming they were the victims of intolerance. Indeed, attempts by the tolerance police – from the intolerant left – to shut down this 48-year-old married English mum of two and pro-women activist have only amplified her message.

Looking at comments on news websites, many Australians, particularly females, seem to find what Parker has to say about women quite compelling. Yet much of the media bought the guilt-by-association line that Parker was a right-wing nut job because her Melbourne rally was crashed by neo-Nazi males.

As Parker told Spiked Online chief political writer Brendan O’Neill in an excellent podcast available on YouTube, she had never suspected Nazis would find a rally for women’s rights appealing. If you are undecided about Parker, it’s worth listening to the full 56-minute interview. You will certainly discover Parker is anything but a right-wing fanatic.

She concludes the interview by rejecting any suggestion her trip to Australia and NZ was a loss for her cause, especially the attack on her in Auckland when hundreds of LGBTQI protesters, including many large men, assaulted her.

“No it was a spectacular win. I want John down the road, he’s a scaffolder, to know the nonsense being taught to his daughter. In that New Zealand flashpoint we have really said, ‘hey look at this, at what’s really happening here’. These trans activists always do my work better than I ever could,” Parker said.

If you want an idea how some of the mainstream media here treated the visit, it’s worth listening to an interview that Raf Epstein conducted on March 24 with the organiser and sponsor of Parker’s trip, Andrew Cooper, who is the national director of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Worse was ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson’s hectoring interview with Victorian Opposition Leader John Pesutto on March 27.

Ferguson demanded to know why Pesutto had not expelled state Liberal MP Moira Deeming for her appearance with Parker at the Melbourne rally. Ferguson seemed unaware of the substance of a speech by Deeming to her party room that day that effectively rolled Pesutto, forcing him to accept a nine-month suspension for Deeming rather than expulsion.

Ferguson was focused on a tweet in which she claimed Deeming was walking back her condemnation of the rally. Ninety minutes earlier, Peta Credlin on Sky News Australia had reported in detail the actual speech Deeming made to her party room that afternoon.

Deeming reportedly told her colleagues she had been assaulted as a four-year-old, and was raised partly by a Jewish uncle and Holocaust survivor. The emotional speech resonated with her party colleagues and has all but destroyed Pesutto’s leadership.

It was foolish for Pesutto to link Deeming by association to Nazism, and even sillier to allow junior staff to lift false links about Parker’s politics from the internet. But why no words from Ferguson about Deeming’s passionate plea to her party? Does the national broadcaster’s showpiece nightly current affairs program not think viewers deserved to hear that Deeming was determined to “make sure other children and women don’t suffer like I did”?

For his part, Epstein was determined to press home a point about the violence done to trans people and to suggest that by sponsoring Parker’s visit, CPAC was simply putting trans lives at risk.

This is the pointy end of the trans debate. While activists are right to demand tolerance, their own intolerance is in effect subjecting biological women to the desires and needs of biological men – in this case, trans men.

It was fitting that in the middle of the Parker saga, World Athletics on March 24 announced it was banning trans male athletes who had gone through male puberty from elite women’s athletics competitions. Doing otherwise would be the modern equivalent of allowing East German female drug cheats to batter Australian women in athletics and swimming in the 1970s.

Posie Parker, JK Rowling and Germaine Greer are right not to let the fight for women’s rights be overtaken by an extremist minority who want transitioned men to be accepted as biological women.

In her excellent review of British feminist Karen Ingala Smith’s new book, Defending Women’s Spaces, this newspaper’s Antonella Gambotto-Burke on March 3 quoted some startling UK figures that reporters who have condemned Parker’s rallies should think about.

The sex imbalance between victims and perpetrators of domestic and sexual abuse remains staggering. In the year ending March 2020, “74 per cent of domestic abuse-related victims of criminal damage and arson were women; 77 per cent of victims of public order offences were women; 73 per cent of victims of crime against the person were women; 94 per cent of victims of domestic abuse-related sexual offences were women; and 83 per cent of victims of high-frequency repeat crimes (more than 10 crimes) were women”.

Parker and her supporters campaign for the safety of women. They are not anti-trans. But Ingala Smith does cite figures showing women are at higher risk of assaults, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex changing rooms and says two-thirds of sexual assaults in leisure facilities and pools occur in mixed-sex change rooms. That does not mean these were perpetrated by trans people but it does underscore the need for women’s-only facilities.

Gambotto-Burke asks if female victims of male violence are “being thrown under the bus by trans women activists and the prevailing ideology, which prioritises the needs and wants of a tiny, colourful minority over the majority of the population”.

In media terms, the framing of this debate by left-wing journalists too often treats everyday Australians as prejudiced, perhaps even evil. Yet these everyday Australians voted for marriage equality.

If ABC management really wants to understand its falling radio audience numbers, it should forget paying money for audience research projects. The board should demand to know how senior editorial managers and their reporters view the values of ordinary Australians. It should ask editorial management why the rights of extreme minority activists are so often privileged over the rights of the wider electorate.

Or is the national broadcaster’s real target market now just the young activist class?

It’s one thing for the Guardian Australia to call Parker anti-trans. Paid for by all Australians, the national broadcaster needs to be better than that.