Not So Keen on Free Speech
1st May 2023
Consider Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a women’s rights activist who holds rallies under the rubric Let Women Speak. She advertises a place and time, turns up with stewards in hi-viz jackets, and hands the mic to any woman with something to say. Some talk about men who identify as women using women’s toilets and changing rooms at workplaces and gyms, or muscling into women-only support groups for everything from addiction to the menopause.
One frequent speaker served a prison sentence locked up with a trans-identified man; another, a disabled woman, fears asking for a female carer only for a man who identifies as a woman to turn up. An increasingly common theme is schools colluding with gender-distressed children’s delusion that they can change sex.
In a sane world, what these women say wouldn’t attract criticism; indeed, it wouldn’t even need to be said. But often they are drowned out by transactivists shrieking threats and slogans of the sort Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, called thought-terminating clichés: “brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases [that] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis”. “Trans women are women”. “Trans rights are human rights”. “Kill all terfs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists]”.