‘Trans activists have no idea they’re in a cult’

Have we passed peak trans? April’s UK Supreme Court ruling on gender marked a major victory in the fight to keep men out of women’s spaces. An array of institutions have updated their policies and politicians have felt emboldened to claim they were always TERFs all along. Even UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who once claimed that one in 1,000 women might have a penis, now self-identifies as a champion of women’s rights and a believer in biological reality. But could it be too soon to celebrate this seeming vibe shift?

Kellie-Jay Keen – aka Posie Parker; women’s rights campaigner and founder of Let Women Speak – was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Kellie-Jay and Brendan discussed the battles ahead against the gender borg, the brilliance of TERF island and the scourge of Islamist misogyny. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: The Supreme Court ruling was a huge win for women’s rights. But presumably trans ideology hasn’t gone away?

Kellie-Jay Keen: I’m mindful that we don’t get too excited. It’s about what people will do, not what they’ll say. All along, people have said things from both sides of their mouth. Some will go, ‘I support trans rights’, at the same time as saying, ‘I’ve always wanted women to have their own spaces’. But those two positions just don’t mix. They’re irreconcilable.

I’m going to wait until the government comes down hard on, say, a local leisure centre that’s still allowing men into its changing rooms. Or for legislation that says an incapacitated woman must have female-only care, unless there’s an essential reason otherwise. Until we see that, I’m not really convinced. It’s only words.

O’Neill:: Where do the problems still lie?

Keen: Everywhere. Something weird has happened in this country, where people don’t think they have to follow the law – and certain groups of people definitely don’t have to follow the law. What do you do with the male teacher who wears his fetish to work, for example? People think, ‘Well, you know, a woman would be able to dress like that’. But he’s not a woman, is he? So what if he wears a little flowery sundress? He’s still wearing his fetish to work in a school with children.

There are also issues like unisex changing rooms in leisure centers – they call them ‘changing villages’. I would like to return to segregated private spaces for males and females. And if that causes alarm to men who want to come into women’s spaces, then I would suggest those men are predatory, and exactly the type of men we most need to keep out of women’s spaces.

O’Neill: It does seem like more people are coming out of the woodwork to say women should have single-sex spaces, or a woman is an adult-human female. Has there been a cultural shift, in your view?

Keen: I thought the Supreme Court ruling would cause the TERF movement to collapse. Instead, it welcomed more women who no longer fear losing their jobs or being arrested. We’ve had a huge influx of people joining Let Women Speak and the Party of Women. There’s certainly been a shift in our direction.

I flip between feelings of generosity and anger about this shift. Sometimes I think, where have you been for so long? I was banned from Twitter for four-and-a-half years. I’m demonetised on every platform. People like to say the pioneers do really well. I think the pioneers are the ones that get killed, and it’s the settlers that benefit.

O’Neill: Do you expect a backlash from the trans activists?

Keen: I think they’ll double down, and insist that they’re a persecuted minority. But I’ve always thought the best way to convince anybody that these men shouldn’t be in our spaces is just to have a look at them. There was a convicted violent criminal who specifically named me in front of the police and said, ‘You should be afraid’. Most of these men are just nasty misogynists.

There’s also a lot of kids out there that have had helicopter parenting, who are spoiled, entitled – maybe slightly personality disordered – and have no understanding that they’re in a cult. They still think they’re fighting the good fight. I think it might take them a little while to adjust to the fact that the grown-ups have finally stepped back into the room and said, ‘Put your toys away’.

Then, of course, you’ve got the parents of trans kids. They are certainly going to try to carry this on. I don’t want to guess the consequences of a boy finding out as a man that he had his sexual function stolen by his parents and the medical profession, and what he might do to gain vengeance for that. I don’t know how angry I’d be, but I think I would be murderous.

O’Neill: You’ve also been outspoken on the issue of grooming gangs. Why do you think so few other women’s rights campaigners have?

Keen: I often get in trouble when I say that feminists haven’t spoken on this issue in the way that they should have. The reason they haven’t done that is because they don’t want to appear ‘Islamophobic’. And maybe they don’t care about working-class girls as much as they do about other girls. That’s my honest opinion in relation to the feminist hierarchy and why they’ve avoided this issue. They’re self-serving, and more interested in their own careers than anything else. There are women calling themselves feminists who will talk for hours about ‘man-spreading’ and ‘mansplaining’, for God’s sake, but they’ll never talk about this.

Even the women who do talk about it use this appeasing, gutless language. They say things like ‘Yes, there’s a problem in this community, but there’s rape everywhere.’ Which is a way of not talking about that form of rape. And we’re told the same thing by police, by councils, by social workers, by teachers. All of those victims repeatedly were told that they deserved it, that they didn’t deserve justice, that what was happening to them was because they were scum. That’s why it’s unique.

I use these words ‘Pakistani Muslim pedophile rape gangs’ because if you can’t name a thing, you can’t really talk about it. It should offend you when you hear those words. You should be totally offended that we live in a country where this has been allowed to go on for decades and decades, and nobody wanted to talk about it.

Kellie-Jay Keen was speaking to Brendan O’Neilll. Watch the full conversation here: