Podcast #212: Kellie-Jay Keen on Protecting Women, and Facing Down Aggressive Gender-Rights Mobs
The British activist once known as Posie Parker talks to Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay about the assault she endured in New Zealand, why she doesn’t call herself a feminist, and the dangers of the “full-on cult” that has mobilized against her.
Mobbed but Unbowed: An Interview with Kellie-Jay Keen
Holly Lawford-Smith sits down with the women’s rights activist now leading the charge against gender ideologues.
Two days after her March 18th Let Women Speak event in Melbourne, I sat down with Kellie-Jay Keen in a downtown café to ask her about the new “gender-critical” (my preferred term) women’s-rights movement, of which she has now become a de facto leader.
Since we spoke two weeks ago, a lot has happened.
The Melbourne event was gatecrashed by black-clad members of a fascist group that performed Nazi salutes and held up a banner reading “Destroy Paedo Freaks,” thereby allowing Keen to be smeared by opponents as being in league with far-right elements. The willingness of Australian authorities to protect her freedom of speech appeared to decline at this point. At Keen’s subsequent appearance in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, there was a minimal police presence and high levels of intimidation from protesters. Things spiralled further during a dangerous fracas in Auckland, which saw Keen and a number of her supporters assaulted by aggressive trans-rights protesters, following which the Auckland and Wellington events were ultimately cancelled.
Keen is now back home in the UK, where she’s announced the formation of the “Party of Women,” with Keen herself running directly against Labour leader Keir Starmer in the parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St Pancras in the next general election. In my March 20th conversation with Keen, we talked about her rejection of the label “feminist,” her rising popularity and media profile, and her thoughts on the movement for women’s sex-based rights. I wrote the interview up based on my notes; these are not her exact words.
Holly Lawford-Smith
The Auckland Mobbing of Kellie-Jay Keen Was Fuelled by Media-Peddled Misinformation
Why are journalists at Stuff, The Spinoff, and other New Zealand outlets promoting propaganda on behalf of trans-rights activists?
Kellie-Jay Keen is a five-foot-one, British middle-aged mother of four children who happens to believe that the word “woman” should be reserved for those who are biologically female. As many Quillette readers and podcast listeners will already know, she headlined a March 25th women’s rights event in Auckland called Let Women Speak, which was shut down by protester violence. Keen has been under fire for years from trans-rights activists (who believe that men can become women, and vice versa, by acts of self-declaration). And many such activists in New Zealand were quick to smear Keen as a fascist, on the basis that a small group of apparent Nazis had showed up in the vicinity of one of her recent events in Australia. Yet Keen had been invited to New Zealand by a collective that included a Māori women’s group (Mana Wāhine Kōrero). One might think that even Keen’s most ardent critics would acknowledge that Indigenous organizations are not generally in the business of hosting white supremacists. As we shall see, however, the campaign against Keen has hardly been marked by fairness or intellectual honesty. And sadly, much of the misinformation has been promoted not just by activists, but also by mainstream media sources right here in New Zealand.
Laura López
An Auckland Mob Shut Down a Women’s Rights Activist—And Proved Her Point
The violent treatment of Kellie-Jay Keen betrays the fanaticism and misogyny that has infected progressive gender politics.
The Quillette Editorial Board
