Saturday 6th of April, a great clamour echoes down Princes Street. A mixture of music and furious chants and sirens interrupts the usual hum of tourists and traffic. By the gardens, a quiet metal pen is surrounded on both sides.

Posie Parker, real name Kelly Jay Keen, is a right-wing internet poster who makes a living by feeding the flames of anti-transgender hatred on Twitter and selling cheap merchandise. Today, her world tour has reached Edinburgh.

In and amongst her motley crowd are Anti-Abortionists from the Scottish Family Party, Neo-Nazis from the Scottish Defence League, Transphobes from Women Won’t Wheesht, and fans of crypto-fascist internet personality Wings over Scotland. They are all at one another’s throats. The misbegotten purpose of the gathering is to unite these disparate groups with the one thing they hate more than one another: transgender people not being dead.

Their protest, ostensibly about the SNP’s new hate crime law, is much more concerned with being cruel to transgender people. The content of their signs and shouts would constitute a hate crime even without the new law, but they are mostly inaudible. They are blotted out on both sides by a cacophony.

On one side, a large, noisy, dance party rages.  Queers, straight folk, trade unionists and allies mostly blotting out the hate speeches. Occasionally, an off-tempo chant booms out of the sound system, but mostly it’s playing queer classics.  Powerful women from the STUC black workers, disabled & LGBT committees gather and speak about real feminism, muffled somewhat by the noise. A message of support from Belfast rings out over the PA.

On the other side of the transphobic bloc, antifascists and unaffiliated queer activists rage against the barrier. Chants of ‘No borders, no nations, trans liberation’ and ‘trans rights, women’s rights, one struggle, one fight’ blast out of megaphones.

One group’s hope, earlier, had been to no-platform the fascists and their allies by preventing them from setting up altogether, but police played the cabaret against those occupying the space, by refusing to let the cabaret set up at all unless the fascists were also given a platform. In the end, the ransom worked: Keen’s neo-nazis were allowed access to the protest area. Police Scotland drove two groups of queer people apart to protect fascists.

Overall, the counter-protest was quite successful. The sonic bombardment, along with persistent technical issues on the fascists’ end, resulted in a fairly lacklustre event on their side. However, we must acknowledge that the number of fascists and fascist bedfellows in attendance was disturbing. In previous, pre-pandemic years, such a gathering of fascists would have to be escorted back to their buses by police, or would no-show out of fear and embarrassment. The COVID-19 lockdown was necessary, but during those two years Edinburgh’s organising capacity plummeted as many organisers moved, became disabled, or otherwise were unable to pass on skills to the next generation. We must work to rebuild that generational knowledge and collective power in spite of the continuing effect of the pandemic.

At present, the greatest danger that Posie Parker’s gatherings represent is in their creation of a milieu where the far-right can network with the merely confused, all drawing a veneer of respectability from a few discredited academics.

If fascists in our city are emboldened by this, if or when they choose to meet again, we need numbers. It’s not enough to have a polite party next to them: we must have a party that can actively seize their space and prevent them from organising. We must refuse to let ourselves be played against one another by Police Scotland.

The only way to protect freedom of speech and expression is to resist those who would eliminate and dominate others. 

We may be a pale shadow of our former power, but a pale shadow is still a shadow.

From another RTIE activist on the ground

“Having seen the face of organised transphobia in Edinburgh, I’m not impressed. A small, scared crowd, complaining about our presence and waving expensively-printed banners with their own increasingly weird memes on them. If, after however many years of organised transphobia, the best they have is a bunch of in-jokes and no new ideas beyond a basic denial of reality, I think it’s a bit sad. When corralled and penned in by police crowd-control barriers it was relatively easy to deny them a chance to try and waste time and energy by ‘debating’, and both shouting over them with chants either supporting women’s and trans people’s rights, or rubbing their noses in the fact that there’s fascists in their ranks, appears to have had some effect on the more moderate. It was also notable how many tried very hard to ‘engage us in debate’ or told us off for not ‘debating them’ – never give the enemy what they want, after all.

Judging by the chatter on TERF twitter following the event and observations on the day, the noise and disruption of the protests was a serious dampener on their ability to enjoy the event, which will hopefully both prevent deeper indoctrination and reduce their ability to socialise or recruit. Many of the crowd were unable to hear their speakers (not that any of them had anything particularly new to say). They also both did not like the fact that the majority of counter-protesters were masked and spent a lot of time as a group filming and photographing us. I believe there might be a divide between those with genuinely held (often trauma-based) concerns about trans people and those who are simply part of the movement to bully and harass us, and the conduct of the latter when faced with counter-protesters will hopefully deepen that divide. In future, we should be open to listening to the concerns of the former and engaging in a dialogue with a view to potentially getting them out of this particular movement.

I think it’d be productive to focus on marginalised groups within the organised transphobia movement – try to drive home to gay, lesbian and bisexual people as well as people of colour (of whom two were in attendance, that I could see) that the movement they are in is and is allied with explicit fascists, and that working with such people doesn’t tend to end very well. Calling out that their movement is funded and based on US evangelicalist propaganda and explicitly identifying fascist groups like the Scottish Family Party and the SDL who were in attendance is also likely to be useful and seemed to work on the ground. They also didn’t seem to like having it pointed out that the expensive merchandise they’re wearing is funding nothing more than some Nazi YouTuber.

In conclusion, every one you walk away from is a victory, and we gained valuable organising and tactical experience from this encounter. What we need, always, is bodies – more people willing to stand up to these fascists and their supporters, and willing to organise against them.”