Occasionally, there are awkward moments in activism, and one of those is finding out that you appear to be on the same side as campaigners who should hate you. The homophobes or the anti-abortionists may love bomb you when you express concerns about, say, assisted suicide, but keeping in mind that they would hate you in the rest of your life is always smart. If you object to it for one reason – disability rights – and they do for another – they believe that only God should decide when somebody departs this earthly realm – then what could appear to be a useful relationship will crumble under any scrutiny.
Sometimes, however, unexpected alliances can reveal a truth about a movement that some may otherwise find difficult to see.
The blogger who uses the pseudonym Jean Hatchet wrote a post in which she explains that she had cancelled a planned trip to the States with other “gender critical” women when she found out that they were to meet with some right-wing activists.
With Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who appears online as Posie Parker, planning collaborations with right-wing organisations such as The Heritage Foundation and religious groups such as Hands Across the Aisle, Hatchet felt too uncomfortable to go along on the visit.
Hatchet wrote, “I wanted to march and protest and meet other feminist women. However I know that in reality you can’t pick and choose. If there are links with abhorrent right wing groups it is unacceptable to take part in any of it. I knew that I would still be seen as agreeing with anything Posie does if I am on a trip alongside her. I don’t agree with lots of it. She doesn’t ask anyone’s opinion anyway. It is very hard to tell Posie when you don’t agree with her. She stops speaking to you. I finally said I was unable to come on the trip. I stated that the reason is the right wing and/or religious links being formed. I wished the group well with the We Need To Talk style event where Meghan Murphy will speak. I like Venice Allan and the talks she organises are brilliant. I’m sure it will be interesting to watch.
“In response to my withdrawal message to the organising group I was accused of “purity politics” by one of the WoLF women and this was reiterated by Posie. I am angry about that. I don’t really know what it is supposed to mean. I call it feminism actually. Another woman tried to silence me by saying I am “destructive” for tweeting my “divisive” opposition to the Heritage Foundation panel that she will speak on. The irony of being told not to speak on social media about a trip opposing the silencing of women is not lost on me.”
It is unusual for me to be referring to the blog of a woman who campaigns against trans rights, but it seems that she has little reason to lie at this stage, because she is fully aware that her words will be (and have been) used by those very fighters for trans rights who make her so uncomfortable. People in the ‘gender critical’ Reddit community and beyond became anxious about the apparent contradictions in the campaigning, and what actually happened was even worse than I had imagined possible.
Parker and crew from the Women’s Liberation Front are so convinced that trans women should not be treated as women and trans men should not be treated as men that they “got into bed with ultra-conservatives from the Family Policy Alliance and Focus on the Family, in order to challenge legal anti-discrimination protections for trans people”.
Focus on the Family preaches that women should submit to their husbands, and that sex should only ever occur between a husband and wife pairing.
As if all of that was not offensive or transparent enough, Parker than went to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT+ organisation, to harass and harangue the national press secretary Sarah McBride.
Filmed misgendering McBride and yelling in a way that I suspect could have constituted a hate crime in the UK, Parker presumably took advantage of the US’s free speech laws to claim that McBride hated lesbians.
As if Parker cares about lesbians. Nothing that she has ever done has demonstrated that she thinks about our rights at all, unless they give her a pass to attempt to justify transphobic bile apparently on our behalf.
So while the likes of the Heritage Foundation are happy to pretend to join hands with those who sound like they legitimise transphobia on behalf of women, we must remember that this alliance does more than shame transphobes. It exposes them. None of this is for the benefit of cis women or cis lesbians, it is all to justify and commit hate against those who are vulnerable and oppressed.
These are not the actions of feminists. Feminists do not ally with people so keen to take away women’s rights and agency. This is not feminism.
After all, as Dr Maya Angelou told us, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.
Photo: Ted Eytan
I was a mutual follower with ‘Posie’ back in the early 2010s when I also knew a mutual friend of hers who was then a prominent anti-cuts campaigner with a disabled daughter. I quickly discovered that she was a bigot with a strong anti-Muslim tendency; in particular, she tended towards believing that anything Muslim women did that she disapproved of must be the result of conditioning. There is, I believe, a group of feminists in the Bristol area with a strong interventionist tendency; they are obsessed with the idea that FGM is rife despite the paucity of actual evidence (as opposed to rumours, assumptions and third-hand anecdotes).
It’s no surprise that a lot of TERFs are suspicious of her. Some of them are more scrupulous about teaming up with racists than others. There are a lot of recent sudden converts now that some aspects of their position have gained traction, including one that is notorious for picking fights with anyone and everyone, including a prominent anti-VAWG campaigner, and has been banned from Twitter for life (after screaming her abuse from about seven different accounts) and a lot of them do not trust her either. Most of them have long been associated with the Left, but have found that the most receptive audience has been in Tory newspapers here and the Christian right in the USA.