Kellie-Jay Keen warns of ‘worrying’ rise of authoritarianism in Australia
Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, says her tour of Australia and NZ has boosted support, but also highlighted the rise of authoritarianism.
Kellie-Jay Keen is walking by the Avon River when the driver of a small truck toots, leans out and hollers “f..k off” to grab her attention, before quickly adding “Keep it up, I love your work”, gives a thumbs-up and drives off.
Keen says she is getting more of that kind of attention, particularly support from mainstream women and men, following her high-profile Let Women Speak tour of Australia and New Zealand, where conflated political messaging and violence made front-page headlines about the treatment of women.
“It was a victory,’’ says Keen, back in her Wiltshire homeland, surrounded by Saxon sandstone buildings and tourist shops, reflecting on what had been a momentous week in bringing pro-women issues to the fore.
But why did it suddenly kick off? The 48-year-old has some theories, including that Australians are easy to coerce because of their easygoing nature.
“I think you have a really worrying rise of authoritarianism,’’ she says. “And I think this is one of the elements of the mass disinformation, misinformation of the populace. There is a correlation, I can’t tell you what it is, but if we think about the worst countries in the world for this gender bullshit: Scotland, Canada, the blue states in the United States, not the red states, you’ve got New Zealand, Ireland and Australia, and what they have in common is really hard lockdowns.
“Maybe (in Australia) it’s because everyone is so easygoing, so maybe that you’re just easier to coerce. Because nobody thinks it’s going to be nefarious. Australians are a bit like, well, that’d be right now, it’d be fine … And then the next time they (discover they) have no rights.”
To stress the point, Keen says Australians quickly surrendered guns following the Port Arthur massacre, “which is great”, but notes Americans “don’t want to give up defences as citizens against a tyrannical government”.
Keen, a mother of three sons and a daughter, aged 14 to 21, was a housewife in Wiltshire until her outrage about the treatment of women and the erasure of women in language. Relabelling breastfeeding as chest feeding and pregnant women to a person with a uterus led her to start selling T-shirts with pro-women slogans to fund her activism and a non-profit foundation for women.
Her crusade gathered pace in 2018 when she was questioned by police for tweeting under her pseudonym, The Posie Parker, about “castration” in reference to Susie Green, then chief executive of British trans charity Mermaids, who took her 16-year-old child to Thailand for full gender reassignment surgery. Posie and Parker were two names Keen had considered for her own children. She first used the pseudonym in Mumsnet discussions.
Keen claims the misogyny and hatred by aggressive trans activists who appeal for kindness and fairness has been vividly exposed during her $50,000 Oceania tour, even though she abandoned it prematurely after a terrifying rally in Auckland when a 72-year-old woman who wanted to hear her speak suffered a broken eye socket during a melee while police, inexplicably, remained at a distance.
One of the high-profile trans activists, Shaleel Lal, who was not involved in the violence, was this week named Young New Zealander of the Year.
Keen says she feared she could be crushed or, if she fell, kicked and trampled. “I saw those faces in that crowd in New Zealand of them really enjoying women feeling afraid,’’ she says.
As for Australia’s reception, she doesn’t mince words. She says John Pesutto, the Victorian Liberal leader, “repeatedly lied” about allegations of her links to neo-Nazis, which she attributes to believing falsehoods added to her Wikipedia entry.
“Wouldn’t you have at least said to someone before I say this to the world ‘can we just check it’s true?’ Not even because you care about me, but maybe because you care about your own reputation.”
She vehemently denies any links to Nazis, but acknowledges to once using a Nazi-dressed Barbie doll as an avatar as a joke and to “take the sting out of that horrible name calling” when her friends called her a Nazi Barbie.
She also questions why the Andrews government and Victoria Police allowed neo-Nazis to gather on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne, positioning them some distance from her rally – but at an angle where they could be caught in the same photo.
She says her critics attempted to demean and discredit her by linking her to neo-Nazis.
“I knew I was going to be opposed (in Australia and New Zealand). I knew they would oppose me. I didn’t know that they’d be allowed to aggressively mob us,’’ she says.
In Hobart, Keen couldn’t be heard for the swearing and shouting, including by politicians. “You can tell us you hate us but you can be far enough away that we still get to speak. It is not your right to silence us, so that was really bad,’’ she says.
“There’s this entitlement of these people on the left that they have no consequences and they can behave atrociously, and it’s fine to have no respect for the office in which they dwell.”
Keen’s tour of Australia and New Zealand was funded by sales of her T-shirts and stickers, with Conservative Political Action Conference providing insurance cover only and a group called Binary contributing $1000 towards security costs.
In Britain, high-profile feminists – including JK Rowling, Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock – have backed Keen, questioning why women were not supported in Hobart and New Zealand.
Keen is now planning to enter British politics, launching the Party of Women to highlight the need for women’s spaces.
“It’s going to focus on language and women’s rights, very much the campaign that I’ve been doing on the tour and I’m going to run against (Labour leader) Keir Starmer,” she says.
Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, famously couldn’t answer when asked if a woman could have a penis and insisted it was wrong to say only women could have a cervix.
Back in 2018, Keen paid for a billboard poster in Liverpool saying “woman: noun, adult human female”, but it was taken down almost immediately after a complaint. Similarly last year she organised an Edinburgh billboard poster saying “I (heart) JK Rowling”, which was removed by Network Rail which said it violated political advertising rules.
Keen explains: “I don’t expect to win. But I will be able to put billboards up, because they cannot refuse me. So that dictionary definition is going to go straight back. I will be able to demand answers from people who want positions of power in this country.
“My activism has always been about reaching those women that don’t know. I know if you said to a woman or man in this country, your 80-year-old mother is going to go into hospital in a female-only ward and next to her is going to be a man with a penis who calls himself a woman, I know that most people will understand what that means.
“And yet nobody really talks in those terms. And I think politicians don’t talk in those terms. And academics don’t talk in those terms. Fair enough, but it means this. It means having a penis in a changing room with your daughter. That’s what it means.”
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