An Auckland Mob Shut Down a Women’s Rights Activist—And Proved Her Point

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.

The 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Meanwhile, organizers of the government-sponsored Auckland Pride Festival announced (with an apparently straight face) that the mob-inflicted cancellation of Parker’s events “demonstrates the power of community organising and solidarity,” as well as “a relief to many in our communities targeted by her hatred.” Which is to say that the treatment of Keen can’t be blamed on a few local fanatics: It’s being condoned by those who present themselves as mainstream LGBT civic leaders.

As with all attempts to justify violent political methods, the claim here is that mob members were acting out of urgent humanitarian necessity. While most transgender people seek the same common-sense human-rights protections as everyone else, the activists who purport to speak for them tend to communicate in comically catastrophic terms, often presenting trans people as existing on the cusp of a literally genocidal apocalypse—a particularly ludicrous premise in a place such as New Zealand, where trans rights are embedded at every level of government. Under this conceit, any means of shutting up gender-critical women such as Keen are justified, on the theory that letting her articulate the scientific reality of biological sex differences in a public forum would be tantamount to allowing a modern-day Nuremberg rally.

This type of aggressive trans activism is hardly unique to New Zealand. Nor are conservatives the only figures targeted. Indeed, some of the most vicious attacks are directed at progressive apostates such as Jesse Singal, who are expected to toe the trans-women-are-women party line, even if that means violating traditional progressive causes such as the protection of women from abuse, harassment, and erasure.

In the UK, Harry Potter author JK Rowling has received so many death threats from trans activists that she says she could “paper the house with them.” Last week, Ana Kasparian, a high profile progressive political commentator in the United States, tweeted, “I’m a woman. Please don’t ever refer to me as a person with a uterus, birthing person, or person who menstruates. How do people not realize how degrading this is? You can support the transgender community without doing this shit.” To which a self-described “gender and tech” expert at Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic replied, “oh fuck off with this stupid made up bullshit.”

In Australia, feminists who oppose sharing bathrooms and other vulnerable spaces with biological males are casually lumped in with Nazis by leading “progressive” politicians, on the basis that hatemongers try to gatecrash their events. In Canada, progressive activists infamously attempted to prevent feminist Meghan Murphy from speaking at a Toronto library. Amazingly, the mob received support from the city’s mayor, John Tory (who recently resigned in disgrace after admitting to having an affair with a—presumably female-pronouned—staffer less than half his age).

Toronto’s Meghan Murphy Meltdown: A Case Study in Media-Driven Social Panic

Sydney. London. Toronto.

QuilletteJonathan Kay

In a recent Quillette article, Bernard Lane noted that “the activist milieu that I think of as Transworld often seems back to front and upside down.” Lane was writing specifically about the scandal at Britain’s soon-to-be-shuttered Tavistock clinic, where healthcare providers recklessly sped trans-identified teenagers into permanently life-altering medical therapies despite the absence of sound data proving their safety. But the weaponization of gender ideology to undermine hard-won women’s rights presents an equally “upside down” spectacle. Just a few years ago, it was socially regressive conservatives who stood in opposition to women seeking legal protections. In 2023, such opposition is just as likely to come from self-styled “progressives” who seem more concerned with the sanctity of pronouns than actual human beings.

Of course, we all support the right of trans individuals to live with dignity and safety. As with all forms of bigotry, instances of real transphobia can be found in even the most otherwise tolerant societies; and trans people should be protected where necessary. At the same time, any functional liberal society requires reciprocity among equity-seeking constituencies, as well as a balancing process in such (inevitable) cases where the claims of different vulnerable groups conflict with one another. And so our laws must take heed of the fact that a small subset of biological men, trans and non-trans alike, always will pose extraordinary dangers to women. These men do not suddenly become less dangerous after changing their pronouns. And it is a disgrace to the progressive cause that so many of its loudest and most influential adherents pretend otherwise. Indeed, if by some miracle of time travel, you were able to go back just a few decades and explain to 20th-century feminists that their 21st-century successors were cheering the mobbing of women who object to biological males having unfettered access to women’s prisons, lockers rooms, and sports events, they would regard you as utterly insane.

And yet, here we are. Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the Australian state of Victoria are among the jurisdictions where a biologically male prisoner can be legally recognized as female on the basis of self-identification alone. No surgery or diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required. In Ireland, journalists recently exposed the fact that a biologically male sex offender who self-describes as “Barbie Kardashian” was serving time in the women’s section of Limerick Prison. In 2021, Kardashian, who has 15 previous convictions including sexual assault, was found guilty of making threats to rape, torture, and murder Kardashian’s own mother. Yet the orthodox “intersectional feminist” position is that this monster is every bit as much a woman as the mother he threatened to kill.

We freely admit that, by disposition, Quillette’s editors and contributors are inclined toward the gender-critical movement’s polite camp. Keen, in particular, has said things with which we disagree, and has sometimes chosen her tactics and allies in a manner that we’ve found reckless. But the least that can be said for her is that she was an early opponent of gender extremism who warned us all of the threat posed to women at a time when her more polite contemporaries still offered their objections sotto voce. Keen’s own brutal treatment in New Zealand vindicates her warnings. And we would ask anyone who claims to champion women’s rights to consider how their convictions might be reconciled with the disgraceful fracas that unfolded last Saturday in Auckland.