An Auckland Mob Shut Down a Women’s Rights Activist—And Proved Her PointThe violent treatment of Kellie-Jay Keen betrays the fanaticism and misogyny that has infected progressive gender politics.
The Quillette Editorial Board
28 Mar 2023
The campaign to protect the recognition of biological sex differences, like many political movements, breaks down between—let us call them—polite and impolite factions. Members of the polite group, well-represented by the “gender-critical” professors and established journalists who’ve written on this subject for Quillette, tend to advance their cause in the form of lengthy essays, avoid the rhetoric associated with angry street protests, and defer to the preferred pronouns of self-described trans women who demand access to protected female spaces. Members of the impolite faction, on the other hand, have no time for (as they see it) ivory-tower tracts and hypocritical social courtesies, and so proceed straight to blunt slogans that pay little heed to the feelings of trans women.
British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, is the prototypically impolite gender crit, often engaging in aggressive and confrontational tactics that, at times, have turned her into something of a pariah. Yet by sheer doggedness, Keen now has managed to thoroughly discredit her trans-activist opponents, by rousing them to scenes of misogynistic violence that are even now circulating on social media as viral sensations.
https://twitter.com/aniobrien/status/1639888636555702273The fact that these shocking scenes unfolded in a peaceful and tolerant country such as New Zealand, of all places, may at first seem odd. But it will not come as a surprise to those who’ve followed the increasingly radicalized campaign among progressives aimed at entirely replacing biological sex with (self-defined) gender as a marker of identity. This is a movement that’s risen to prominence thanks to English-language (primarily American-sourced) texts and scholars. And its most devout acolytes tend to be academics and activists casting about for the next human-rights frontier to conquer, now that racial equality and gay marriage have become old hat in their societies. Like Canada and Australia, New Zealand provides this privileged constituency with a natural habitat, which helps explain why Keen put Auckland on her 2023 speaking tour.
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As is by now well-known, Keen abandoned her March 25th speaking event in Auckland following the appearance of a violent mob. The next day’s scheduled event in Wellington was also cancelled, due to what her website describes as credible threats on her life.
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In Auckland, an assailant named Eliana Rubashkyn doused Keen with red fluid, later offering the lurid claim that it represented the blood of “our people … I want her to know that her words are blood.” Keen, who’d become understandably terrified by this point, was also surrounded by a baying mob. Her visibly shaken supporters, some of them elderly women, had to be evacuated by police. “The situation here is shameful, Keen later tweeted. “I’m very afraid for the women here. The women hatred is extreme.”
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Even Keen’s most pointed (and polite) skeptics within the gender-crit movement would be hard-pressed to disagree. One banner on display at her event read, “These boots stomp TERFs” (the latter term indicating Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a term of abuse used to indicate contempt for those, such as Parker, who refuse to let biological distinctions be erased in the service of gender identity). A member of the mob was caught on video punching one of Keen’s elderly supporters. Later, a self-described Auckland-based “LGBTQIA+ activist” described being sexually aroused by the fact that Keen was “fearing for her life.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/03/28/an-auckland-mob-shut-down-a-womens-rights-activist-and-proved-her-point/
