Over the weekend Kellie-Jay Keen (also known as Posie Parker) was physically attacked while trying to address an audience in Auckland, and was reportedly doused with tomato soup.
While trying to address a small audience as part of her “Let Women Speak” tour, barricades were ripped down, and Keen was surrounded by a baying mob. Keen’s supporters – some of them elderly women – had to be evacuated by police, and were visibly shaken. After the mob stormed the podium and Keen was rushed away, all that was left was an empty podium and a banner that said “Let Women Speak”.
Following the attack, Keen tweeted: “Please can anyone attending to #letWomenSpeakAuckland to speak please let me know if they’re safe. The situation here is shameful. I’m very afraid for the women here. The women hatred is extreme.”
This type of aggressive trans activism is not unique to New Zealand or Australia. Last week, Ana Kasparian, a high-profile progressive political commentator in the US tweeted: “I’m a woman. Please don’t ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, birthing person, or person who menstruates. How do people not realise how degrading this is? You can support the transgender community without doing this shit.”
I'm a woman. Please don't ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, birthing person, or person who menstruates. How do people not realize how degrading this is? You can support the transgender community without doing this shit.
— Ana Kasparian (@AnaKasparian) March 22, 2023
To which a trans activist replied: “oh f..k off with this stupid made up bullshit. Trans folks are having their existence criminalised in state after state and you want to whine about this shit.” Over in the UK, JK Rowling, has been harassed, bullied and threatened relentlessly for her advocacy of women’s rights. Transgender activists have staged protests outside her Scottish home. She has received so many death threats she says she could “paper the house with them”.
This is the reality women face today. If we do not like being called “birthing persons” we’re transphobic. If we do not want to share bathrooms with biological males, we’re bigots. And if we want to organise demonstrations in support of women’s rights, we’re likely to be mobbed, and conflated with Nazis by leading “progressive” politicians.
Women across the world have suffered campaigns of abuse and intimidation just for making factual statements such as “a woman is an adult biological female”. Women across the world have experienced bullying simply because they do not wish to share bathrooms, changerooms, domestic violence and rape shelters with biological males.
Imagine, if you will, going back in a time machine to the Ye Olde Days of the early 2000s, and informing the world that women in the future would be systematically abused and threatened simply for arguing girls and women should be allowed to access female-only spaces. They wouldn’t believe you. Just ask Sall Grover, a Gold Coast business woman, who has been taken to Federal Court by a trans activist after attempting to create a female-only social networking app. Or Melbourne philosophy professor, Holly Lawford-Smith, who has been subjected to countless episodes of deplatforming and censorship, for views that would be considered commonplace as little as 10 years ago.
THIS happened to a 70yo woman at the Auckland Let Women Speak event. Punched repeatedly by a male trans activist as she tried to get past.
— ♀ï¸Jennifer Gingrich âœ¡ï¸ (@fem_mb) March 26, 2023
The 'be kind' crowd is even trying to justify this. Where is the media reporting on this violence against women? https://t.co/RgA0BPVoRz
But this is the world we live in. And this shouldn’t be happening. All my life, I’ve been told that women’s rights are important, that women should not live in fear, and that violence against women is not OK. Why has our culture changed so rapidly? Who decided this was “progressive”? And why are women who speak out about these issues demonised so widely?
Like most people who live in a pluralistic liberal democracy, I have no problem with consenting adults doing whatever they want with their own lives. I support the rights of trans individuals to live their lives with dignity and safety. At the same time, however, liberalism requires reciprocity, and acceptance that other people wish to live their lives with dignity and safety as well.
I am not so naive as to imagine trans’ rights are never going to come into conflict with women’s rights. And in considering the necessary trade-offs it helps to remember why women have had sex-based rights in the first place. I have always disagreed with a certain type of feminist who argues that men-as-a-class are somehow responsible for all sexual crimes against women. But it is undeniable that a small subset of men are extraordinarily dangerous to women. These men do not suddenly become less dangerous after putting on a wig.
Recent scandals overseas highlight how far the threat to women can go. Ireland and Scotland have “self-ID” laws (similar to Victoria), which allow one to be legally recognised as a different sex on the basis of self-identification alone. No surgery or diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required.
In Ireland, journalists recently exposed the fact that a biologically male sex offender, who calls himself “Barbie Kardashian”, was serving time in the women’s section of Limerick Prison.
In 2021, Kardashian – who has 15 previous convictions including sexual assault – was found guilty of making extreme threats to rape, torture and kill his own mother. In Scotland, a serial rapist who donned a blonde wig and changed his name to Isla Bryson while in custody, was initially housed in a female prison until public outcry forced authorities to revisit their policies. Scotland has now “paused” the housing of trans inmates in female prisons. Yet a six foot five paedophile with a history of assaulting girls and beating up male prisoners reportedly remains housed in the women’s estate.
Like the farcical situations in Scotland and Ireland, Corrections Victoria’s policy is to house inmates according to their self-identified gender. How many male sex offenders are currently housed in the female prisons is unknown. While Corrections Victoria’s policy is to house trans inmates according to their self-identification, it also has a policy of not tracking them at the same time. So it is impossible for researchers to know what the outcomes of self-ID policies will be.
While women today enjoy almost all the economic and political opportunities men do, this doesn’t change the fact that our biology leaves us, in certain situations, physically vulnerable. It should not be controversial for us to have our own bathrooms and changerooms, seconded away from male bodies. It should not be controversial for us to be called “women”, and it should not be controversial to let women speak.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette.
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