Mandatory Denunciations and the Case of Deeming v Pesutto
That the political opponents of Let Women Speak call them ‘the far right’ doesn’t make them the far right. And the actual far right showing up to their rally uninvited doesn’t make the far right feminists, either.
On 19 March 2023 at 10:59am, Melbourne women’s rights advocate Angie Jones tweeted the following message:
I have been denouncing Nazis more than ever in the last 24hrs despite them having nothing to do with us. It’s changed absolutely nothing. It’s just about making women bend & grovel for forgiveness for sins that aren’t ours.
— Angie Jones (@angijones) March 18, 2023
It was Sunday morning, the day after the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally hosted by British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen. On its website, Let Women Speak describes itself as “a global movement that creates space for women to centre women.” Why had Jones, who attended the rally, been spending time in its aftermath denouncing Nazis?
The explanation was most likely the enormous pressure on attendees of the rally to do so, coming for the most part from social media. Twenty or so white men had staged their own protest on the steps of parliament at the same time as the Let Women Speak event, holding a banner that read ‘Destroy Paedo Freaks.’ The progressives of Melbourne had decided that ‘Paedo’ meant ‘trans’ and therefore that the men were there as part of the Let Women Speak event.
One of the men, all of whom were dressed in black bloc, was later identified as Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network, the white supremacist group the press described as ‘Nazis.’ Their stand against paedophilia—more plausibly related to a ‘protect the children’ protest happening at the same time in the same location—transformed the ordinary political activity of attending a rally for a women’s rights cause into “involvement in an anti-trans rights rally attended by neo-Nazis” (this was the ABC’s description of Liberal MP Moira Deeming’s attendance). Hence, the pressure to denounce: if you don’t denounce then you’re welcoming their support; and if you’re welcoming their support then you’re basically admitting that you have Nazi views.
Sunday 19 March was a happy day indeed for those who had opposed Let Women Speak all along, for now they had a bigger and better stick to beat feminists with, namely the claim that they were working with Nazis, or allied with Nazis, or had Nazis on their side.
A number of the women who attended the Let Women Speak rally experienced personal and professional repercussions from the online commentary and media reporting in the aftermath of the rally (myself included), but none was more severely impacted than MP Moira Deeming, who as a result of attending and helping to organise the rally was expelled from the Liberal parliamentary party room. In a Media Release of 19 March, Victorian Liberal Leader John Pesutto wrote:
