‘It was a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic.’ – The Spectator.
Anyone who witnessed yesterday’s shameful mobbing of Posie Parker, aka Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull knows this.
The women’s rights advocate who came to give Kiwi women a platform to express their concerns about the impact of gender ideology on their private spaces, and the safeguarding of children from unnecessary medical procedures, was blocked from speaking by an enormous crowd of trans activists in Mt Albert Park yesterday.
Commentators who were there have said the situation was extremely volatile and dangerous, because the police refused to intervene to protect Keen Minshull or the women that came to speak.
“There were no police as far as the eye could see, there were none on the way and I saw none when I finally did manage to get out. And the protesters knew it – you could tell. They knew they could act with impunity. You could tell they knew that had the blessing of the media, the Government and now seemingly, the Police.
“At one point someone pointed their flag at one of the ladies up there with us. She grabbed it and it broke. He then used the shard to try jab her in the stomach. I had to dodge out of the way to avoid getting accidentally stabbed with it. I’ve never been so scared,” Katrina Briggs recounted.
She is 11 weeks pregnant.
Free speech advocate Ani O’Brien, also scheduled to speak, said that “someone is going to get killed”, in an email from the Free Speech Union responding to the chaos. She continued:
“… I was caught in the angry crowd. I had whistles blown in my face, abuse screamed at me, and I was fearful for my own safety. This was nothing compared to what Kellie-Jay endured. She was trapped and surrounded by a mob screaming abuse and trying to get past her security guards.
“There were no police in sight. Despite widely publicised threats of violence, the police were nowhere near the protest frontlines to prevent the event from devolving into chaos as it did. I had to call the police from the middle of the screaming crowd! And even then they weren’t particularly concerned that a woman was trapped in the midst of a mob determined to get to her.
“I have never been more concerned about our country. Free speech is completely dead when the angriest and loudest activists are allowed to decide who gets to speak and listen.”
The Police reportedly refused to guarantee her safety, saying that Posie Parker was “… in a public space. If she feels unsafe she needs to leave”. Throughout the livestream she can be heard asking where the police were. Turns out they were standing idly by, just around the corner.
She has since left the country and the backpedaling has already begun.
A lot of people saw the true colours of trans activists this weekend, and they sure weren’t baby pink and baby blue.
It should go without saying (it won’t) that no-one in their right mind wants harm to come to trans people, or believes that they should not have their own safe spaces and safeguards. They absolutely should.
For whom the mob trolls
The whole sad affair played out with the backdrop of media complicity. Reporters and broadcasters has spent the week leading up to yesterday defaming and misrepresenting Keen Minshull as a white supremacist nazi anti-trans activists.
She is none of those things, and nor are any of the women who wanted to speak yesterday. But don’t let truth get in the way of some good clickbait and narrative reinforcing, aye. I’m looking at you Kim Hill, Jonathan Milne, Matty McLean – and many many many more of you.
This may be a watershed moment for the country as New Zealanders saw what the love, inclusion and tolerance of the woke left really looks like this week, but this is hardly new. Just a step up in the slow march of fascism that has been visiting our shores for three years now.
Consider the moment at Waitangi earlier this year when Donna Pokere Philips, co-leader of the Freedom and Outdoors Party, was unceremoniously sung over, as she attempted a korero with Marama Davidson and other Green Party MPs on the topic of vaccine injury from the covid jab.
Davidson can be seen sitting on the stage as Pokere Philips is drowned out. In fact the Green representatives downright infantilise her telling her to ‘enoho’ (sit down) like a good little girl when she gets too hot to handle.
Davidson also fanned the flames of the protesters at yesterday’s event, as did Golriz Garahaman, who both attended to oversee the death of free speech in this country. Gharahman called her a Nazi (defamation). Davidson downplayed concerns women have about the increasing number of transwomen accessing female only spaces through misdirection.
These moments represent incremental shifts in the national consciousness, which is being transformed into what Chris Trotter has called a “totalitarian mindset”. I just call it fascism.
Only weeks ago I watched as a person I know to otherwise be kind and loving, tell someone that being mandated out of his job was simply something he had to “suck up for the greater good of the country”.
This was after declaring that former PM Jacinda Ardern has been the most compassionate leader this country had ever had. His comments came after this person pointed out the Ardern had forced him out of his job, which was hardly compassionate.
Not only did this person justify his views as coming from an indigenous perspective (take care of the whole, not the individual) when really these things are two sides of the same coin, he then repeated a string of media slogans and talking points he’d picked up over the last few years. Not a single original thought could be heard. Suck and spit.
This is one example of how fascist ideas have taken hold and become acceptable to people who previously valued free speech and civil liberties. People now accept and justify authoritarian controls on their lives, and especially on the lives and bodies of others.
The same playbook was rolled out for Keen Minshull as the one used against protesters last year at Parliament. They were shouted down and called far right Nazi extremists. They were not listened to. And when any kind of adult engagement has been sought, they’re told it would be ‘unsafe’ for those calling us names to actually engage, or that they don’t deal with far right conspiracy nutters etc., thus the accusers and silencers never have to actually defend their behaviour,
If you are thinking that this behaviour is just contained to these two highly loaded issues: vaccines and transgender rights, you would be wrong.
Once the environment for speech suppression is firmly in place, and this weekend was an indicator that it certainly is, enforcement can be targeted at anyone at any time depending on what narratives need amplifying and what ones need suppressing, from the point of view of those in power.
The mob will not just troll for Posie Parker, it will troll for thee, my friend.
What Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull came here to say
You might wonder what all the fuss was about, and if like the activists and media said, she was some kind of hateful Nazi, then who really cares if she was intimidated out of speaking. It matters little that she denounced the Nazi’s that turned up at her Hobart rally, and the media certainly didn’t bother to tell you that, did they?
She said directly before and after the event in Auckland, that she never been so scared, that she feared for her life.
This is what Keen Minshull came here to say:
- Men are not women and biological sex cannot be changed.
- Men have no place in single sex facilities, services or sports regardless of gender identity, as this is a matter of safety for women and children.
- Puberty blockers harm children.
- Women are being erased in language and replaced with terms like ‘chest feeder’ and ‘menstruator’.
- Parents need to be involved in decisions concerning their children.
What she was not saying:
- That trans people should have no rights and should not exist.
- That Nazism is ok.
But this is what tends to happen when women, even allies, raise concerns:
It is like talking to a brick wall, because they don’t use arguments. Trans activist appear to operate on nothing more than anger and slogans:
- “Trans rights are not up for discussion” – conveniently excusing themselves from actually debating anyone.
- “Trans rights are human rights “ – human rights are already universal – we’re talking about the right to be in women’s bathrooms and compete in women’s sports, and be housed in women’s prisons.
- “Trans women are women” – whatever you believe, gender and sex are not the same. If you have a penis, you are man. There is no ‘right way’ to be a man, so go ahead and express yourself. You don’t need women’s spaces for that.
Safeguarding children and parental rights
The gender affirming care model was made law last year in the Conversion Therapy Bill.
This means that clinically, the only acceptable thing to do when a young person says they identify as trans is to immediately affirm it. If you, as a parent, have your doubts about it, or prefer to urge your child to wait and see what happens over time, you could call foul of the law. You will also be screened by psychologists to see if you will play ball or be obstructive.
Now by law, 16 year olds can start themselves on sex hormones without parental knowledge or consent, if the parents don’t affirm their trans identity.
“More often than not, these parents just believe that the denial of material reality cannot be a healthy response to their child’s misery, or just want to give them time to grow up before going down such a drastic road, or think (with growing evidence) that kids are doing it because their friends are.
“But after a literal tick-box GP referral, teenagers can go down to your local hospital and get chemically sterilised after three appointments with a gender affirming clinical psychologist, who then refers them to an endocrinologist for medical assessment and prescription. That is it,” a recent piece of anonymous commentary notes.
And then there is the horror of top and bottom surgery that no-one is talking about, and the growing number of de-transitioners who are not being supported or heard.
This is one of the other things that Keen Minshull came here to talk about.
If you want to learn more about how transgender ideology is impacting New Zealand kids, Laura Lopez writes at Arguments with Friends. She’s been investigating for some time and says that puberty blockers are being prescribed at more than ten times the rate of the UK.
She also covers what the Ministry of Education is teaching our kids with regards to this ideology (most parents have no idea) and provides resources for parents who want to start a dialogue about this with their kids schools. Highly recommended.