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Frank
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It is a mystery to me that anyone could look at those Posie Parker gatherings and think Posie Parker is the problem.
On one side there’s the diminutive bottle-blonde from Britain whose rallying cry is “Let women speak”. Parker’s supporters are mainly women, too. All of them have been impeccably civil. They’ve stood still in a public place and given calm, sensible speeches, mainly on their concerns with transgenderism.
On the other side, in contrast, there is a baying mob. We’ve seen huge crowds of Posiephobics bellowing insults at these women who only want to speak.
I was horrified by the sight of independent senator Lidia Thorpe crawling on her hands and knees – after she was knocked to the ground by cops – so she could tell “that thing” (Parker) that she was not welcome here.
That thing? Now that’s dehumanising language.
I was shocked by the sight of the Tasmanian Greens senator Nick McKim saying Parker and her gang of “Nazi-supported transphobes” should not be referred to as TERFs but as TERDs.
A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist – that is, a woman who commits the thoughtcrime of believing men cannot become women. A better title for them was TERDs, McKim said – “trans-exclusionary right-wing dropkicks”.
They’re not TERFs, they are TERDs,” he said, much to the juvenile glee of Posie-haters on Twitter. You don’t need a PhD in linguistics to work out why McKim chose the acronym TERD. It’s because it sounds the same as turd: excrement, faeces.
A public official grossly demeans women whose only offence is to speak in public and we’re meant to be more outraged by Posie?
I have been alarmed by the heaving crowds that have tried to menace Parker into silence. The mob has chanted “F..k off, Posie, f..k off”. Social media has overflowed with hyperbolic effluent about Parker. She’s scum, she’s a Nazi Barbie. Misogyny much?
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
So, yes, there has been hate and hysteria on the streets of Australia these past couple of weeks. But it hasn’t come from Posie’s camp. It has come from her searingly intolerant critics.
The woke demonise Parker as a bigot, but it is they who behave like bigots.
The Oxford Dictionary of English defines bigotry as “intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself”. Who does that better describe – Parker and her supporters, who only want to express their beliefs, or the mobs who furiously shout down these women, these “things”, these turds?
The fury around Parker tells us a really important truth about political correctness. It comes dolled up in the language of kindness and fairness, but in reality it’s a chillingly unforgiving creed that will destroy anyone who deviates from its commandments. In the mob loathing for Parker we can glimpse the iron fist of intolerance that lurks in the velvet glove of woke.
Posie Parker is the pseudonym of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, one of the best-known blasphemers against trans thinking.
She believes sex is immutable. She thinks a man never becomes a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. She wants biological males out of women’s sports and women’s spaces.
Her Let Women Speak initiative is genius, in my view. She cleverly entices the woke to behave in a menacing fashion in full public view.
Across Britain and now in Australia, her public stunts lure misogynists into daylight. She knows the counter-protesters will make her point for her. She and her allies say: “Let women speak”, and the mob essentially replies: “No. Shut up. Go home.”
Hey presto, the sexism that she believes courses through the veins of the trans lobby makes itself visible. Job done.
For me, the most cynical thing the Posie-haters did during her visit to Australia was brand her movement “Nazi-adjacent”. They did this after a bunch of hard-right idiots turned up to Parker’s gathering in Melbourne. Uninvited, it should be noted.
This gave rise to the chant: “Posie Parker, you can’t hide/You’ve got Nazis on your side.”
What desperate stuff. Virtually every anti-Israel demo of recent times has had anti-Semites on it, people who horrifically demean Jews as Nazis or child-killers. Yet the left never describes Palestine solidarity as “Nazi-adjacent”.
Their hurling of the Nazi gibe at Posie’s women is a sexist silencing tactic. It’s designed to paint these harridans as being beyond the pale, and thus ripe for censure and punishment.
Ironically, these right-on leftists are rehabilitating the crudest insult of the old alt-right.
Those hard-right rabblerousers infamously called feminists “feminazis”. Now the woke left calls them “Nazi-adjacent”. In both cases the low aim is to shame women into silence, to drive these uppity broads off the streets and back into the kitchen, presumably.
Posie and her allies are defending reason and freedom. They’re standing up for biological truth and the right of women to express themselves.
Their woke persecutors, meanwhile, are the foot soldiers of irrationalism. They fantasise that there are 72 genders and they clamour for the silencing of all who disagree.
Liberty or absurdity? I know which side I’m on.
Brendan O’Neill is the former editor and now chief political writer at Spiked
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