The image above is a screenshot from a video of a trans rights protester and security men at the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne. The mike had been grabbed from a woman speaker, and two men wrestled with the protester to retrieve it.
The way the two men are behaving, and especially the hand around the protester's throat, and how they frame part of the sign behind them, caught my eye. it also caught the eye of influential trans activist, Katie Montgomery. Let Women Speak organiser, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, claims that the protester was trans, but a masked woman calling herself Joanne, and claiming to be the protester, appeared on Montgomery's You Tube channel.
Given her face is clearly visible on two of the videos I've seen of the incident, quite why Joanne needed to wear a mask while being interviewed by Montgomery, is anyone's guess.
Joanne also said, along with some standard issue Antifa agitprop, that no complaint would be laid with the police as they are "all bastards".
It's a bit immaterial in any event given the image has already provided grist for the trans rights mill, and it's completely inappropriate for a bloke to grab anyone by the throat in that way.
The security overreach aside, I don't much like the image of big men acting as "protectors" of little women, nor the name of the event which to me sounds a bit too much like a request than a demand.
More importantly, there is the question of how the person who has made herself the iconic centre of the movement, ought to have reacted to actual Nazis gatecrashing her event. If she was sensible, and if she wants to win the middle ground on this issue – and that is where it will be decided – Keen-Minshull should have immediately issued a press statement condemning that sort of far right, ultra-nationalist, white supremacist movement without reservation, and distancing her organisation, and gender critical feminism more widely, from it.
She, or the Aussie organisers, should also have immediately asked formal questions of the Victoria police as to why Nazis were allowed to parade in that way at that point, and why they ushered the twenty Black Shorts out through the cordon they'd established between the LWS rally and the trans rights protesters.
It seems that Keen-Minshull decided not to comment until pressured during an interview which made it all too little, too late. Had she never been prepared to share platforms with far right organisations and individuals, her claim that people should realise Let Women Speak is nothing to do with the far right might hold more water than it does.
Her supporters, instead of urging her to distance herself, are arguing she should not have to issue a statement because the trans activists won't believe her, and they will demand more and more retractions and qualifying statements until she is forced to resile from gender critical claims and demands completely. But, without such a statement, and in light of her prior connections, the trans activists were always going to dominate the media discourse, and her refusal to speak out was always going to be widely interpreted as further proof that she is either on the far right or is indebted to far right organisations in some way. Every far right, religious extremist organisation or individual coat-tailing these issues which are not rejected by GC feminists, will be taken as proof, either of political naivet̩ or of cynical collaboration, or worse, as evidence that the entire movement is what the gender identity extremists claim Рfar right and transphobic.
Keen-Minshull is gutsy and self-opinionated; she is clearly stubborn and she likes to win. These qualities, combined with a lack of political campaigning experience mean she makes tactical blunders. The rambling video she made that was directed at the NZ prime minister over the questions raised about her right of entry to the country, is a case in point.
Her stubborn insistence that, for example, gender identity is so important an issue for all women, losing abortion rights would be a price worth paying to stop it, is either acting as a calculating spokeswoman for the forces that want to remove the right to abortion, or she is so focussed on a single goal, so intent on winning, and so buoyed up by her own celebrity, she fails to consider the wider implications of what she says.
NZ transactivists and allies are indulging in the most inflamed rhetoric imaginable, for example, seeing "white power gestures" in her hand movements, which only serves to polarise the debate even further.
She should have taken every opportunity to defuse that sort of foolishness by making it absolutely and immediately clear she will have no truck with far right extremists. Instead, she tacitly encouraged her supporters to counter-attack with salvos of their own hyperbolic claims and feverish rhetoric.
I don't know enough about her to be able to say with absolute certainty whether she is a right winger who is calculatedly using this facet of a re-energised women's rights movement, or if she is a well-intentioned woman whose anger has been fanned by the hyperbolic rejection of her concerns by trans activists and allies in white left.
Their smug certitude often makes me spit tacks so I can understand why some women are now anti-left, or at least, the so-called "woke" left. Whether that makes them committed to the right or to the far right is moot, as is whether any of them can be won back to the left.
That political ball is in very much in play.
Keen-Minshull is now being presented both in the legacy media and on social media in NZ in the most ludicrously hyperbolic terms. An article on what should be NZ's voice of balance, rationality, and moderation, Radio NZ, failed to do even the most basic checks on the story. Had they done so, they'd have seen that the Black Shorts were not there to support LWS but to hijack both the rally and the counter-protest for their own political ends ... the promotion of their brand of fundamentalist, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, hyper-patriarchal Christianity.
These "anti-paedo" groups are currently focussed on the same sort of claims that drove a man to rush into a pizza restaurant in Washington with an automatic weapon, to "rescue" the kidnapped children he believed had been chained in the basement by Democratic Party child abusers. It's also behind the links now being drawn between drag queens and paedophilia.
These are the sort of people who form real-life vigilante squads, and some of whom are so full of rage they have lost all connection to reality. The story about vigilantes who attacked a UK paediatrician's home in 2000 because they got confused about her job title is amusing... until these people turn their on-line conspiracy theorising into more serious forms of action and people get hurt or killed. (1)
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