Category: Transgenderism

Richard King spoke with Angie Jones, the principal organiser of Let Women Speak group, about the rally’s objective in Melbourne on Saturday.

Source: Angie Jones, the principal organiser of Let Women Speak – 2hd

Last weekend demonstrated that the trans wars are raging just as fiercely down under. The women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker — otherwise known as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshell — has this month brought her Let Women Speak tour to Australia, aiming to provide a public space for discussion of the conflict of interest between trans rights activism and gender-critical feminists. The fifth leg of the tour, unfortunately, played host to some extremely unsavoury visitors.

At Saturday’s event in Melbourne, black-clad members of the far-Right National Socialist Movement crashed the feminist gathering, performing Nazi salutes and displaying signs which accused trans people of being child abusers. They clashed with the Socialist Alliance, who were protesting the event, and hogged the media limelight at the expense of Parker and the other speakers.

On social media and in the press, however, these two groups — women seeking a platform to discuss their rights and neo-Nazi provocateurs — were conflated into one evil entity. Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews issued a statement, saying that “Nazis aren’t welcome”. He continued, “They were there to say the trans community don’t deserve rights, safety or dignity. That’s what Nazis do. Their evil ideology is to scapegoat minorities – and it’s got no place here. And those who stand with them don’t, either.”

In reality, this was a melting pot of conflicting ideologies coming together in protest, counter-protest, parallel protest and unabashed opportunism. Many at the LWS event, including local Liberal Party MP Moira Deeming, were initially unaware of the neo-Nazi presence given they were facing away from the steps of Parliament where the National Socialist Movement performed their Sieg Heil salute. When she did become aware of their presence, a frightened Deeming assumed that — in all-black and with their faces hidden — they were militant protestors.

Similarly, the organiser of the Melbourne event, Angie Jones, told radio host Richard King that the neo-Nazis made clear their disdain for feminists beforehand: “They had nothing to do with us. We find their views abhorrent, and they find us abhorrent. On Twitter they said they despised us and that we were trying to turn people into lesbians.”

Distracted by the circus in Melbourne, Australia’s political and media class failed abysmally in their duty to represent these issues from all sides.

Source: The truth about Posie Parker and the neo-Nazis – The Post

There are two issues at stake in the transwars that are again finding their way to our shores with ‘Posie Parker’s’ (aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s) Australian Let Women Speak tour. These are: children’s bodily integrity, and women’s rights including the need for single-sex spaces. These issues have very different histories, politics, and ontologies but they coalesce around transgenderism because this is the point at which the conflict of interest arises.

On social media and in the legacy media this week, this critique has been presented as tantamount to Nazi ideology. What we have is a classic case of reductio ad Hitlerum, defined by Leo Strauss as a type of ad hominem used to derail arguments by creating a ‘guilt by association’. In other words, ‘playing the Nazi card’.

This means if neo-Nazis are on the steps of the Victorian Parliament, ushered around by police and with excellent camera crews capturing their Sieg Heil, and you happen to be in the vicinity, you’re ‘guilty by association’.

When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and progressive party leaders such as the Greens’ Adam Bandt define these women (or their protest) as associating with ‘neo-Nazis’, we have a gross misrepresentation at play and one that anyone participating in this charade should be ashamed of.

This whole mess is an orchestrated misrepresentation that amounts to propaganda.

A quick lesson in propaganda: the truth doesn’t matter if the lie has been accepted. Certainly, in the public’s mind, ‘gender critical feminism’ and the important political issues this argument represents, have been thoroughly besmirched.

In the public’s mind, Kellie-Jay has a kitsch Norma Jean aesthetic going on and seems to be showcasing more star-spangled nylon and sequins as her social media following grows (and concomitantly, as we descend into the ‘bread and circuses’ era of the culture wars). Moreover, in my opinion she has failed to overtly distance herself from the far Right, as some local feminist groups have rightly pointed out.

Nonetheless, her message is direct and simple, delivered in a working-class idiom: ‘men can’t have vaginas’, ‘men can’t give birth’, ‘men can’t be women’, ‘men shouldn’t be in vulnerable women’s spaces’, ‘men can’t (or shouldn’t) compete in women’s sports’, and ‘children aren’t old enough to surgically remove their primary and secondary sex organs, or make decisions about adult sexuality or fertility’.

Magically, and in lockstep, governments the world over introduced legislation and policy to allow self ID, to outlaw ‘conversion therapy’ (i.e., newspeak for adopting an exploratory approach to gender dysphoria rather than uncritical affirmation), to update the protected category of sex in law, and to revise statutes regarding sex discrimination so that sex-category was replaced with gender identity.

This effectively created a mandate around the acceptance of transgenderism with no capacity – politically or socially – to disagree. If the ‘choice’ is to agree or be an incorrigible bigot with few job prospects, except perhaps as Mark Latham’s cleaning lady, then most people are going to shut up and go along with this agenda. This is the coward’s bargain; it is not agreement.

In the real world of heterodox politics and culture, Posie Parker’s message cuts across the increasingly defunct Right/Left divide and indeed speaks to women and men across the political spectrum.

Source: Guilt by association | The Spectator Australia

Greens leader Adam Bandt is coming under intense scrutiny from the party’s grassroots after he accused feminists protesting outside of the Victorian Parliament of being “allies” of Nazis.

“I’m disgusted by the anti-trans rally in Melbourne yesterday, protected by their allies: saluting neo-Nazis,” Mr Bandt said on Twitter.

But one of the women’s rights protesters has slammed Mr Bandt after revealing her own very personal links to the Greens leader.

Nina Vallins said she had volunteered for Mr Bandt for 12 years and even house-sat for him as she accused him of “lying” about the protesters’ apparent links to the neo-Nazis.

“He’s lying. He knows I’m not anti-trans. He knows I’m Jewish and NOT PROTECTED BY NEO-NAZIS,” Ms Vallins said on Twitter.

“SHAME on you Adam for saying that Nazis are my allies. SHAME on you Adam for saying that radical feminists, women speaking up for women, women concerned about transitioning children, are the allies of Nazis.

“You make participation in public society harder and less safe for women who know that there are two sexes and that children should not be transition. YOU SILENCE WOMEN.”

Ms Vallins quit the Greens after she was suspended for six months for her views on trans-inclusionary laws including opposition to shared female bathrooms.

But she has ignited another feud with the Greens over its decision to hand down a light penalty on transgender member Bianca Haven who was found to have breached the party’s code of conduct.

The Greens’ misconduct panel only censured Ms Haven after it found she “regularly posts offensive material” and identifies as someone who “holds repugnant views (defending paedophilia, sympathetic to Nazi views, defending incest)”.

Ms Vallins attacked the Greens and Mr Bandt over the stark contrast in its handling of both cases.

“The greens think that me saying ‘women deserve women’s only spaces’ and distinguishing between transwomen and women brings the party into disrepute and my membership should be suspended for six months. But a man can support Nazis, child rape, etc and he gets *censured*,” she said last week.

Source: ‘You silence women’: Adam Bandt savaged by former Greens member for accusing feminist protesters of being Nazi ‘allies’ | Sky News Australia

What most people saw when they watched the chaotic events on the steps of Parliament House on Saturday was a group of neo-Nazis engaging in an act of self-promotion by spreading hate on the highest profile stage they could find.

The confusing events that unfolded on Spring Street on Saturday have resulted in 48 hours of claim, counter-claim and conspiracy.

The result could be that Moira Deeming, an MP elected only last November to the upper house for the Liberals, loses her party endorsement; the Nazi salute is banned from being performed in Victoria; and, if threats become reality, a number of defamation suits are launched.

The protest started when a diminutive British woman – known variously as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, KJK and Posie Parker – organised an Australian and New Zealand tour entitled “Let Women Speak”. She has held rallies in other cities to assert that the transgender lobby is silencing, disparaging and discriminating against women.

She’s appealing to an increasingly angry cohort of women who believe that the push for trans rights has gone too far and is risking the rights and safety of women by allowing “men” (transgender women) into women’s sports, change rooms and other female-only activities.

The speakers at Saturday’s rally ranged from young feminists who said they were once trans allies but had flipped, to older (often lesbian) women worried about losing female-only spaces and claiming people who would otherwise be lesbians were being hoodwinked into transitioning.

One woman, wearing a Greens T-shirt told a story of being punished by her former party for insisting on the rights of “real women”. The audience numbered about 400 mostly middle-aged women.

These activists were once dismissed by their opponents as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but many now the embrace the title. The movement has brought together elements from the right, including the religious right, and the old left. The principal organiser of the Melbourne rally, Angie Jones, describes herself on Twitter as “Gender Heretic. Woman … Leftie. Women’s Rights Activist. Radfem”.

Keen-Minshull is on record saying she had not fully vetted her interviewers to check their beliefs, but added that her cause was too important to be fussy about which YouTube channel she appeared on. She has said she abhors “white supremacy and the racism that fuels it”, but that, as a free speech advocate she thought “dialogue, even with those with the most odious prejudices, is essential”.

But it’s the mostly unimpeded presence of the neo-Nazis that’s caused most angst. The bulk of the police faced the left-wing protesters while having their backs to the Nazis as they sauntered past repeatedly delivering the Sieg Heil salute.

Police are also under fire from the women’s anti-trans activists.

Organiser Jones told The Age the Nazis from the National Socialist Network turned up about halfway through their rally and were “let in by police”. She said she initially thought they were Antifa (anti-fascist activists) seeking to join their mates in the counter-protest.

“Then the police opened up the line,” said Jones, who is Jewish and says she abhors Nazis. She worried they were there to attack the women, but they stood on the steps away from them.

Source: 12ft | Nazis happy after weekend protest at Victoria’s Parliament House

Statement in response to reports from Australia of members of the far-right National Socialist Network attending a Let Women Speak event in Melbourne today.

Women are not responsible for the actions of men or those who want to use the concerns women have for their own political ends. However, the presence of neo-Nazis at women’s rights events is a wake-up call to the need for explicit differentiation between women organising in defence of our rights and those far-right actors who seek to exploit this organising. As a political campaign we believe we have a responsibility to reaffirm our position.

Source: WPUK Statement in solidarity with Australian women – Woman’s Place UK