Suspended Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming battles for ‘sex-based rights’

Victorian state Liberal MP Moira Deeming has declared she is not anti-trans and will continue to push her views on ‘sex-based rights’.

Moira Deeming has spoken of her own sexual assault. Picture: Sky News Australia

Victorian state Liberal MP Moira Deeming has declared she is not anti-trans and will continue to push her views on “sex-based rights”, after she was suspended from the party for speaking at a protest attended by neo-Nazis.

Ms Deeming told Sky News’s Peta Credlin she was “not going anywhere” in her first interview since state Liberal leader John Pesutto attempted – and failed – to have her expelled from the party for “organising, promoting and attending a rally” on the steps of Parliament House on March 18.

“This is my party and I’m not going anywhere, and the issues that I’m standing up for are important to the vast majority of our voters and, in fact, so many people across Victoria and Australia and the world,” she said.

“And look, at the end of the day, this has put a spotlight on this issue and I think it’s really important people understand how the world has changed.

“Women and girls are really vulnerable now because the definition of female doesn’t exist in the law clearly anymore.”

Kellie-Jay Keen, a British anti-transgender rights activist, was at the helm of the rally that both she and Ms Deeming maintain was gatecrashed by a group of masked men who performed the Nazi salute.

Ms Deeming told Sky News she knew what it was like “to be vulnerable”, after she revealed she had been sexually assaulted, including by a teacher who she said was jailed for having sex with minors.

“I know what it’s like … the consequences of being vulnerable, and having no power, and having no voice – and not being able to stop men from coming near you, and even worse, is a horrible feeling,” Ms Deeming said.

“People who haven’t experienced that don’t know what it’s like, and how debilitating it is, not to be able to know that you have a place to go where you are safe from men.

“There were a few years where I really didn’t go out in public because of all the trauma. I still find crowds difficult. So going out that day (of the protest) was very difficult.”

Ms Deeming was suspended from the partyroom for nine months last month.

Mr Pesutto sent her a 15-page dossier outlining why she should be dumped from the party. It included evidence – excerpts from interviews and social media posts – that Ms Deeming shared a platform with Ms Keen, who has associations with people who advocated for a “white ethno state”. The dossier reported that Ms Keen had given a number of interviews to far-right extremists and posted a photo with known Norwegian neo-Nazi Hans Jorgen Lysglimt Johansen, who has denied the holocaust took place.

As well, she used a Barbie doll wearing a Nazi uniform as a social media profile picture and posted a symbol of the Gestapo with a rainbow flag and tweeted “Pridestapo”.

In her response to Mr Pesutto’s letter, Ms Deeming said her contribution at the protest was to “read a letter from a Muslim friend and constituent, who shared her concerns about the loss of sex-based rights from a migrant Muslim perspective”.

After the meeting, Ms Deeming said that “with the benefit of hindsight of what has occurred that my participation may have been an error of judgment that ­resulted in unneeded scrutiny” but she rejected suggestions that Ms Keen was associated with the far-right.

Ms Deeming, who is also openly anti-abortion, was preselected to run in Victoria’s upper house last year after being rejected by the party in Canberra to run as a candidate in the federal seat of Gorton in 2022.