Tomato Juice, Neo-Nazis, MPs Expelled Or Shoved: Posie Parker’s Chaotic Anti-Trans Tour Down Under
“I have grave fears for this place,” British anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who also goes by the name Posie Parker, said as she left New Zealand at the weekend after being doused in tomato soup at her own rally. “This country’s fucked.”
Just days before, she’d reserved the title of “the worst place I’ve ever visited,” for Hobart, Australia. “And I’ve been to Chicago!” she added.
Such was the dramatic and pugnacious tone of her troubled Let Women Speak tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The highly unsuccessful attempts at rallies across both countries was aimed at galvanise a push against transgender equality, which, she claims is “silencing”, endangering and discriminating against women.
The dramatic and combative tour featured neo-Nazis turning up at her rally in Melbourne, a Liberal MP (Moira Deeming) issued with a threat of expulsion from her party for attending, an independent Senator (Lidia Thorpe) violently pushed to the ground in Canberra for protesting and, on Saturday, tomato soup poured over the controversial activist’s head in Auckland.
In Canberra, just 30 supporters turned out. In Hobart, just ten, as Parker hurled abuse at the crowd, insulting their “terrible nose rings,” and “smug little faces,” their “disgusting police force,” calling protesters “fucking deranged arseholes” and “groomers” who should “hang their heads in shame” and asking who the Premier of Tasmania was.
“We’re going to say ‘hello boys’,” Parker told a crowd in Melbourne as two dozen men dressed in black carried a huge banner with the words “Destroy Paedo Freaks,” threw Nazi salutes at pro-trans protesters and chanted “white power.”
In every city she visited, protesters vastly outnumbered supporters, often drowning out her gender critical rhetoric.
Parker claims that trans women are sexual predators who pose a safety threat to girls in female bathrooms. She describes being a transgender woman as a “fetish”.
By the time she got to Auckland, she couldn’t take to the stage and was doused in tomato juice by a protester, in addition to being booed and heckled. A planned Wellington event was cancelled.
In spite of thousands in Auckland protesting with such vigour that Parker had to be escorted by police from the scene, she found one high-profile supporter: JK Rowling. She described the Auckland protest as a “repellent scene” in which “a mob assaulted women speaking up for their rights”.
However, Liberal MP, Bridget Archer told ABC News: “If they want to talk about women’s safety, I don’t think that the issue of… same-sex bathrooms is where the issue of women’s safety is at,” she said. “The most unsafe place for women to be is in their own homes.”
