Grace

The shameful persecution of Posie Parker in New Zealand

25 March 2023, 1:29pm

This is what it must have been like when women were marched to the stake. Yesterday in Auckland the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker found herself surrounded by a deranged, heaving mob. She had tomato soup and placards thrown in her face. She was doused with water. Huge men screamed insults and expletives in her face. The shoving of the crowd became so intense that Parker feared for her life. ‘I genuinely thought that if I fell to the floor I would never get up again’, she said. ‘My children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.’It was a truly chilling spectacle. The mobs’ faces were twisted into masks of feral hatred. They ranted in frenzy as the diminutive Parker, her bottle-blonde hair stained orange from the soup that had been dumped on her, desperately tried to make her way to the safety of a police car. It was a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic.

[link to video]

Next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how Salem came to be consumed by such swirling hysteria, watch the clips of Posie’s persecution in New Zealand. This is how it happens. This is how the fear of witches can overrule reason and unleash the darkest, most punitive passions of the mob.Most popular

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And what is Parker’s crime? What did this witch do? She said, ‘A woman is an adult human female’. That’s it. Parker, whose real name is Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, is well known for her criticism of the ideology of transgenderism. She thinks a man never becomes a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. She thinks if you were born male, you will die male, and in the time in between you have no right whatsoever to enter any women-only space.This is heresy. Dissenting from the gospel of gender ideology is to the 21st century what dissenting from the actual gospels was to the 15th. And so Parker must be punished. It was a modern-day stoning, so mercifully they only threw soup and water and planks of cardboard at the blasphemer.Parker organises public events called ‘Let Women Speak’. She has done it across the UK, in parts of the US, and for the past couple of weeks she’s been doing it in Australia and New Zealand.It’s a genius initiative. She knows these gatherings of women who merely want to give voice to their profane belief that sex can never be changed will draw out crowds of intolerant trans activists and their allies. She knows the ‘Be Kind’ mob will do everything in its power to stop women from speaking. And she knows it will all brilliantly illustrate her core belief: that trans activism is misogyny in disguise, misogyny in drag, if you like, and that it has devoted itself to silencing women who believe in biology.Australia and New Zealand played their parts brilliantly in Parker’s clever scheme. From Melbourne to Canberra, Hobart to Auckland, huge crowds of the right-on turned up to drown out the voices of the pesky women who dare to call men ‘men’. ‘Let women speak’, Parker says. ‘No’, says the mob. She incites them to confess their misogyny and intolerance in full public view. And they do. Auckland was the worst. At Albert park in the centre of the city yesterday, the mob could not hide its vengeful loathing of the uppity women who disagree with its ideologies. Parker is a new kind of witch, one who willingly submits herself to a witch-trial, so that the rest of us might see just how dogmatic and unforgiving the new witch-hunters are. I am full of admiration for her. Her courage is shining a light on the visceral intolerance that advances under the banner of identity politics.The events in Auckland should be a wake-up call for liberals everywhere. We glimpsed the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in the velvet glove of ‘Be Kind’. The misogynistic streak in trans extremism is undeniable now. Watch enraged men kicking down metal barriers so that they might get closer to the witch Posie and tell me this isn’t sexism masquerading as radicalism. Witness the crowing of men who are delighted that the mob made the ‘coward TERF’ run away and tell me this isn’t chauvinism on steroids. Behold the use of megaphones and expletive-laden chants and physical menace to silence a woman and tell me this isn’t a sexist, censorious crusade against women’s freedom of speech.

That mob in Auckland did not emerge out of thin air. No, it was a brutish manifestation of a regressive idea that has been taking hold for some years. Namely, that it should be forbidden to dissent from gender ideology. That it is bigotry to state biological facts. That it ought to be a punishable offence – whether that punishment is being No Platformed or sacked or having objects thrown in your face – to say men are men and women are women.

To see where censorship ends up, just look at those grimacing agitators in Auckland, hatred spreading like a current through their number, as they fight with every fibre of their being to prevent the expression of a critical idea. Censorship begets bigotry. It begets violence itself. For the more we tell people that certain words will hurt them, the more we witlessly incite people to hurt those who dare to utter certain words.That mob was drunk on sanctimony. This is what happens when we tell people their identity is the most important thing in the world and that anything that so much as grazes their self-esteem is an outrage that must be crushed. We nurture a generation of navel-gazing Torquemadas. Posie has exposed them, yet again, and for that she deserves our thanks. This time round, the witches might just win.

WRITTEN BY

Brendan O’Neill

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If eyeliner grants women more power, why does it not grant men more power? Who is granting women power when they wear eyeliner? Why? What kind of power is it?

If eyeliner is worn almost entirely by women and wearing eyeliner "sharp enough to kill a man" is feminist, which specific feminist issue does eyeliner tackle (menstrual health, sexual harassment, medical misogyny, domestic violence shelters)?

every system, every organ, every cell in a woman’s body moves to a complex symphony of hormonal signaling that is circadian (cycling once a day), mensual (once a month), and seasonal (once a year). this beautiful dance is directed by the endocrine system, which consists of glands. the high chieftesses of these glands are the incredibly sensitive gonads, the ovaries. 

these almond-sized glands are so delicate that they will go dormant at the first sign that the outside world may be a less than optimal environment in which to birth and raise a baby. and only now, in the last decade or so, are we finally starting to understand the devastation that is wrought on a developing girl’s health when this happens.

back in the 80’s, when endurance sports were starting to go mainstream, the saying among elite female endurance athletes was “if your period stops, you’re training enough.” those women are now at the tip of the spear of our emerging knowledge of the long term effects of the “female athlete triad”.

the female athlete triad consists of 1) not eating enough, 2) no menstrual cycle, and 3) low bone density. grouping them together like this is rather misleading, because it makes it sound like these symptoms can occur in any combination. the actual relationship is one of definitive and terrifying cause-and-effect.

when a teenage girl stops eating enough to fill her calorie needs, or deliberately exercises beyond her caloric intake, her ovaries receive signals that there’s a famine afoot, that the outside environment is a hostile place, and they shut down. they fucking shut down! can you imagine a male marathon runner saying “fellas, if your testicles still work, you’re not running enough”?

the ovaries are responsible for releasing estrogen, which most teenage girls probably know is responsible for menstruation, breast development and female fat distribution in puberty. what they probably don’t know, because nobody tells them, is that estrogen is also an incredibly powerful steroid that is the primary hormone, in both sexes, that is responsible for mineralizing growing bones. bones are rapidly expanding in volume during puberty, and if a girl’s estrogen is depleted because her ovaries are on strike, she won’t even be able to maintain the bone density she enjoyed in childhood (and her bones are supposed to be getting significantly denser as she grows!).

if she is ignorant of this, a talented and driven teenage female athlete will write off an estrogen crash with “well i didn’t really want periods, tits and hips anyway, they’d just slow me down”, not realizing that she is inducing permanent osteopenia in herself... because she can’t just remineralize her bones after she’s done growing. once she attains her full adult height and her growth plates fuse, that’s it! 

the same women who, in the 80s/90s/00s, were saying “if your period stops, you’re training enough” now suffer from brittle bones. they get multiple compound fractures, shattered bones, just from tripping and falling on a hike. i know many such women. and this is irreversible.

we didn’t, and still don’t, know everything that the ovaries do. how irresponsible we were, to think we could just kneecap our most important glands, with no consequences.

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