The first demonstration I ever went on I had a giants eye view. From my high vantage point I could see far across a vast landscape of heads. Bobbing heads and placards disappeared into the horizon as I sat astride shoulders, licking drips off my ice lolly. Women were everywhere around me.
A few years later and I was standing with what seemed like thousands more women and girls around the fence at Greenham Common, wiping my runny nose on the sleeve of my pale blue duffel coat.
Years more after that, and finally away from home, I splashed through wet London streets, pavements shiny in the dark, to Take Back The Night.
And years later again I would link arms tightly with my own young daughter to protest male violence and celebrate a Million Women Rising.
In fact over my lifetime I have been to countless women’s demonstrations. But never, not once, have I ever seen Nazis on the march.
An analysis of male violence is in so many ways central to feminism, for it is the last threat and ultimate enforcement of male supremacy; it is what can and has always been done to women who step out of line. I abhor it, and not just from an abstract perspective. Not only from a feminist or political one either, it is both personal and visceral in that I cannot look at a video of a woman surrounded by a jostling, baying crowd trying to get at her and not identify with the look of fear on her face. Vicariously, I feel it. Empathically, I know it.
I certainly cannot look at a photograph of a 70 year old woman, her face bruised and swollen, and feel anything other than volcanic fury at the man who did that to her. It causes my breath to catch in my chest and revenge to loom in my mind. It makes me want to punch him back. Rage can so quickly turn to tears though, after all she could have been my mother, or yours. The scenes from New Zealand on Saturday - in which women attending a Let Women Speak event organized by UK activist Kellie-Jay-Keen were vastly outnumbered and subsequently attacked by trans activists - have left me feeling winded and useless, not knowing what to say, unable really to respond.
Except I want to respond - just in a way that is considered, because this orgy of violence against women is not just morally wrong in and of itself, but an unmitigated disaster for every single one of us who has ever demanded the freedom to speak without censor about sex and gender and the differences between. As far as they (trans activists) are concerned, we are all the same.
Male fists fly and always there is a woman to blame: some disagreeable, argumentative type who’s wound them up. Who wound them up this time? Well… I did, according to some, along with other left leaning feminists situated the opposite side of the globe. As though political critique turns previously good men bad and trans rights activists in New Zealand are hanging on the every word of British feminists they’ve likely never heard of. I won’t give this charge the respect it doesn’t deserve. It isn’t true and I’m not about to engage with it as though it may be. We are all of us free to question the politics and ethics of others without being accused of turning once rational men into woman beaters.
Perhaps we are forgetting now that a trans rights activist first assaulted Maria MacLachlan at Speakers Corner back in 2018, or that myself and other women have been on the receiving end of numerous threats of violence over the course of many years, or that – most importantly - any one of us left unprotected by police and security could have been killed that day in Auckland based on nothing more than our refusal to accept that men are women if they say so?
No woman is to blame for the violence in Auckland: not left leaning feminists and not Kellie-Jay-Keen either. But there is a world of difference between women being responsible for male violence and us being responsible for our own political choices. Optics matter, and as women visible and active in political circles we are responsible for what we say and do, for whom we choose to associate with, and whose support we choose to accept. We do, in short, bear some responsibility for our own political reputations.
If you make a choice to be interviewed more than once by Carl Benjamin: founder of far right group Hearts of Oak who once famously said he would not even rape Jess Phillips; or to be photographed smiling along with Pauline Hanson, who is on the record as stating that Australia is in danger of being ”swamped by Asians” and accuses women of fabricating domestic violence… If you go on podcasts with former Trump administration officials accused of having links to neo-nazi groups, and state very clearly that you will not distance yourself from far-right organisations and individuals that are known to have attended your events because all are welcome so long as they agree with you on one single issue, does that make you responsible for male violence? No, it doesn’t. It does, however, make you responsible for any reputation you may garner as being sympathetic to hard right, anti-feminist politics. Does being associated with hard right and anti-feminist politics mean you deserve to be a victim of violence, or that you should not be allowed ever to speak? No. But does it mean that feminists should have every right to voice their strongly held critique of those positions, and your association with them, without being blamed for how the world then sees you? Yes. Yes, it does.
When it comes to politics, we take ownership of our choices by saying what we believe to be true and doing what we believe to be right. There is little dignity in deflection; no honour in shooting the messenger.
The truth is that Nazis did not march on Melbourne in a vacuum. There was a context in which they felt emboldened to hijack what was supposed to be a women’s event; a moral space created in which they believed they would be tolerated. The appropriate response is abject horror, not the slapping down of women who express it.
My position is - and has always been - clear and consistent. I am a feminist and so necessarily stand in opposition to gender identity superseding sex in law and policy, as well as the far and religious right. I stand in opposition to men’s violence as it is enacted upon women from across the political spectrum, and in support of those who embrace gender non conformity while acknowledging the reality of sex and its concurrent oppressions. I am not obliged to choose between the erasure of my sex based rights on one hand and the abandonment of all wider principles on the other. I oppose all association with racists and anti-feminists without shame or hesitation.
I say all this, not in the interests of attacking others, but of carving out a space for feminists who believe in a just world, in which no woman is left behind. One in which we don’t stand on the backs of our sisters in hopes of better reaching our prize. That space exists and it is ours to occupy. Come fill it up - there is work to do.
Left-wing gender-critical feminists may not have carried out the violence against KJK and her supporters in Auckland, but they did contribute to her being called a Nazi by repeating the sort of guilt-by-association smears that were used to make her a target for attack. It’s especially disappointing to see this from women who’ve experienced TRA violence themselves.
The struggle against gender ideology calls for a strategic alliance between all gender-critical people, and a setting aside by the gender-critical left of closed-minded notions of ideological purity.
Meanwhile, Kellie-Jay Keen is out there fighting the war for our rights with heroic tenacity and courage.
Thanks for writing this. As for the commenter just below, she is wrong. KJK refused to distance herself from far right extremists, until she was forced to in order to get into NZ. Many of us have faced violent aggression from queer extremists, which is all the more reason not to hand them a dagger to sink into our backs, as KJ recklessly has done. Rush Limbaugh started the "feminazi" vilification, from the right, and now we see socalled "progressives" using "Nazi" as a club. They had already been doing this for some time before KJ ever got into this issue. Not only did she refuse to listen to women with more experience in fighting genderist overrreach, but she condemned them, even told them they would be "annihilated" for criticizing her approach. Her lack of strategic savvy has hurt us all. Listen to what Australian feminists have to say about the negative effects she has had on their ability to fight institutionalization of genderist dogma: https://feministleft.wordpress.com/2023/04/12/who-won-who-lost-the-fallout-from-kellie-jay-keens-tour-downunder/?fbclid=IwAR2Bl84-7Xyy56aLDS2_8q4BKv8c_DvJEy-YDOB03pMu7x66zhqiNHKrwAk