In a keynote speech at Saturday’s protest, a member of RTiE analysed how Posie Parker is fracturing and factionalising the gender critical ‘movement’.

“We live in absurd times. Nominal feminists like Kellie-Jay Keen align with Fascists such as Britain First and Tommy Robinson. Self-described ‘Leftists’ such as Julie Bindel can move from condemning her politics to defending the Nazis supporting her recent Melbourne rally in the span of a year. And a rational empathetic majority of people are confronted by a Gender Critical minority movement that is neither critical, nor a coherent movement with any understanding of gender beyond the hardback cover of a Victorian biology textbook. Keen’s views are an incoherent mess within a collective of messy incoherence – advocating for women’s rights in the form of armed men being given power to dictate who counts as a woman by policing bathrooms. She takes selfies with neo-nazis and claims Islamophobia is a fiction while also believing that our very existence as trans people is an ‘ideology’. She dresses children’s toys in fucking SS uniforms.

We live in terrifying times. Anti-trans hate crimes have increased by 186 per cent over the last five years, with no coincidence that anti-trans news stories have increased by 217% in the same period. 145 anti-trans bills have been introduced over in the United States, during which time at least 32 trans and gender non-conforming people died as a result of hate crimes, with indirect deaths undocumented. Research this year indicates transgender teenagers are 7.6 times as likely to commit suicide as cisgender peers, and we all live with a 4-fold increased risk of depression and a rate of 40% attempting suicide. Attempts to define us out of existence or restrict our movements as Keen is trying to do, are nothing short of an attempt to make public life impossible for us, that’s both doomed to fail, but has a real material impact in the present.

But this extremist among extremists is her own worst enemy. Her divisiveness is fracturing and factionalising the gender critical ‘movement’. Terfs such as Jean Hatchet and gender crit orgs such as Women’s Place UK have tried to distance themselves from her, while JK Rowling has doubled down on her defence of this white supremacist and herself more recently decided to take the plunge and embrace Holocaust denial. Indeed, across the US and UK TERFS have become the witless tools of the far right who see in them a recruitment device – Nazis can claim they’re feminist, after all, when TERFs fight for conventional gender roles, the prioritisation of parental rights over those of children, and a restrictive, white definition of womanhood.

All this mess is because the Gender Critical Movement is not a coherent belief set (as much as it wants this protection) – its criticality is uncritically reactionary, its movement a loose and contradictory spiral of extremism, and its understanding of gender clueless about the last 40yrs of gender studies. It’s not a manifesto, it has no shared win condition, it’s an self-perpetuating engine of hate whose only aim is to make a tiny minoritised group suffer. It can react but it can’t advance, and in the meantime, today, we can see it’s clearly spinning out.

We will survive, because every year a new generation of our trans siblings and children discover their inner joy. The hateful cycle in front of us will end in a fractured mess, because that’s what it is.”