By David Futrelle
If you’ve been struck by the strange and creepy ideological convergence between so-called “gender-critical feminists” and the far right on the subject of trans people, you may not be altogether surprised to learn that notorious British anti-trans activist Posie Parker — definitely NOT to be confused with indie actress Parker Posey — recently appeared on the podcast of one Jean-Francois Gariepy, an outspoken white nationalist, crude misogynist, and accused sexual exploiter of young women.
It’s still a bit shocking though, as Gariepy — known as JF — is not just an at-right shitbag who has hosted such anti-luminaries as Richard Spencer and David Duke on his show; he’s an alt-right shitbag who has managed to make himself controversial amongst other alt-rightists not for his views but for his alleged treatment of women and teenage girls. Given the amount of misogyny that’s considered perfectly acceptable on the far-right, that’s quite an accomplishment.
As the Daily Beast has noted, JF has been “accused of luring and attempting to impregnate a developmentally disabled Hispanic teenager” whom counselors declared had “the social and mental maturity of a 10- or 11-year-old child.” He has also reputedly engaged in what the Beast described as “a pattern of bizarre and abusive behavior towards [other] women.”
Parker — real name Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull — told PinkNews that she didn’t know about any of this, saying that a cursory examination of JF’s YouTube channel uncovered “nothing [that] stood out as … unusual or problematic.”
Perhaps, but if she had bothered to Google his name, she would have found in the top results a RationalWiki profile detailing his toxic views and behavior, as well as the Daily Beast article quoted above, which appeared under the title “Alt-Right YouTuber Accused of Luring Autistic Teen in Pregnancy Plot.”
While she says she abhors white supremacy, she also told PinkNews that
I make it my business to avoid researching or policing the entire spectrum of someone’s views, I think the mutilation of healthy children’s bodies is too important, and so it’s not usual for me to do an FBI style background check. …
These days so many people are called Nazis and far right that the prophetic warning that we will no longer recognise the real ones is beginning to come true.
It’s really not that hard to tecognize that JF is one of “the real ones.”
Even after JF’s full odiousness was exposed, PinkNews goes on to report, many of Parker’s fans on Mumsnet — a British site aimed at mothers that has been taken over by transphobic ideologues — defended the interview.
“‘Far-right’ always gets thrown around as an insult,” one Mumsnet user said. “Where are the left on this issue? Throwing women and children under the bus is where.”
“If there’s anyone who can confidently debate with anti-feminist right wingers it’s Posie. It’s a really brave and interesting way to go,” one Mumsnet user wrote.
“Posie is bringing the truth about genderism to a wider audience,” another said, adding that “even if it might be an audience of people we don’t particularly like – presumably they still have the right to protect their kids.”
Given his alleged past behavior, one would think these commenters would be more worried about the possible danger that Jean-Francois Gariepy poses to their children.
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How dare that evil wench steal Parker Posey’s name!
I have long speculated that TERFs are headed towards embracing full-on white supremacy. Now, it seems, they’ve made it official. I’m not surprised. TERFs remind me more of MRAs than feminists.
It was also pretty clear that a significant portion of Mumsnet users are actually white supremacists. The fact that they don’t even question Gariepy makes it pretty clear they are sympathetic to his views. There was another user not quoted here who expressed anger that a caller asked if Parker was Jewish and rambled about how she didn’t look like a Jew.
I’m wondering if r/GenderCritical has any even worse takes on this, but I don’t like going there.
EDIT: I checked r/GenderCritical. It seems they haven’t gotten wind of this particular development, but they have really liked this woman in the past.
On the topic of gender, I know I’m a bit late, but happy International Pronouns Day to everyone.
The women’s march and now this. Feminism and leftists are eating themselves and became MRAs. Disgusting.
Aron
We can criticize women without sexist slurs/sexism in general.
This is slightly off topic from the post but I’ve been thinking of it since I saw this on twitter
I hate the way terfs frame spaces that we assume to be cis gender only as a safe place. Like its some magical portal where all cis women protect each otber against the evil penis or some shit. As a cis woman who was raped in a public bathroom by a cis man. It is anything but. Hell for me one of the most traumatic things about that day was not even from the rape itself. It comes from the fact that someone walked into that bathroom during the middle of it. Saw a crying bleeding girl being held down by her hair and then just walked out. They apologised for something and then quickly just walked out. After an hour of laying there and waiting for police noises that I was sure were going to come didn’t. It broke me more then anything else. I was given hope and nothing came from it. I stopped believing in human goodness for a long time after that.
Lainy
via GIPHY
@Fruitloopsie
Was this meant to be tongue in cheek? I can’t tell.
@Lainy
That’s awful. I’m sorry that happened to you.
@Lainy – Oh my goodness, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.
I personally find this alliance astonishing – are they seriously uniting over their hatred of trans people, in spite of what one would assume are their differences? I guess it goes to show that in the case of both groups, hate is the strongest impulse.
Oh noes, the trans women are coming for Mumsnet’s kids!
Except no, they’re not. And some of those kids might well be trans themselves, and just haven’t come out yet. And with parents like these, who could blame them for not doing so?
And in fact, nobody’s “mutilating” ANY children’s bodies; every medical expert in the trans field recommends that nothing so radical as surgery be undertaken before a child turns 18. Until then, the only medical treatments that they CAN undergo are to take puberty blockers at onset of puberty (which is known to be safe, because those drugs are also given to much younger kids to stop premature puberty), and hormone treatments later, once they’re ready to make that transition (and 100% certain that they want to do so). Surgeries are the last step (and in many cases, not even A step), and since they can only happen when the trans kid is legally an adult and capable of making that decision alone, there is nothing to clutch one’s pearls over on this issue at all. Unless, of course, you’re a yucky ‘phobe who would disown a child for not sticking with the gender you arbitrarily assigned them at birth.
Thanks, Mumsnet, for throwing your own kids under the bus and siding with the far right just because you don’t understand transgenderism! I’m sure the Nazis do appreciate that!
Grrmbl.
‘These days so many people are called Nazis and far right that the prophetic warning that we will no longer recognise the real ones is beginning to come true.’
No it’s not. There ARE that many people who are far right and Nazis! And if you can’t see that you’re either one of them or some clueless centrist or liberal enabler. If you’re not explicitly against the Nazis, you’re with them.
Also, Mumsnet was always scum riddled with antivaxxers and other woosters.
@Amy E
Yup. This isn’t the first time TERFs have agreed with the far right, but it’s one of the most obvious. Because to them it’s more important to hurt trans* people than to be a feminist. AFAICT most TERFs don’t actually do anything resembling feminist activism, they just try to stir up hate. You are correct that this is their main motive.
@Knitting Cat Lady
Judging from the comments, it seems many of the Mumsnet people are Nazis, or at least Nazi sympathizers. I don’t think they’re clueless, they’re just trying to play plausible deniability. They know full well what’s going on, they just prefer to ally with Nazi rapists than support trans* people.
I know TERFs are a very small minority of feminism, and the vast majority of feminists are not TERFs, but I do worry about how TERFs affect the outside perception of feminism.
In other TERF news, Linda Bellos, a prominent lesbian activist, showed up at the Supreme Court to oppose protections for LGBT people simply because that includes trans* people.
What the hell is wrong with so many LGB people that they have to pull the ladder up after them?!
And even trying to stop LGBT protections just because they would help T?
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…
I have lost count how many times my Aro/Ace ness was commented on with ‘It’s just a phase/You haven’t met the right person yer/etc.’ by LGB people.
Don’t get me started on mainstream LGB folks reaction to us non binary people.
People suck.
To Lainy:
How horrible for you–I’m so sorry you had to endure that.
Knitting Cat Lady,
Apparently, some think that the legalization of same sex marriage was some sort of automatic win for all time on every issue. Do they really not think that right wing Christian health care providers or employers won’t “exercise their conscience” and discriminate against cis queer people too?
@to all
Thank you, I just needed to get it out of my head. I saw that and I’ve been seeing so much terf shit on my pinterest lately that basically talks about how magical and special cis women spaces are. Like it’s somehow going to save you from violence. When the truth is women and girls will leave you in a room with the devil just the same way as men and boys will turn a blind eye to clear abuse of those around them. We as a society do not know how to handle these things when we see them so we look the other way.
But the one good thing from that trauma? it made me stop waiting for someone to save me. For someone to give a damn when they saw him hurt me. For someone to notice the bruises and bag under my eyes. It made me stop relying on others and taught me that if I wanted to survive I had to stand on my own feet and find some sort of strength to save myself. It took all of my hope being destroyed and my lost faith in humanity for me to finally start fighting back. And then to fight for others, because even though I was strong enough to take, there will always be someone who isn’t. They need the help that I was looking for.
I hope that if any terfs come to this post. They read this comment. They examine there views if they have real concern for others. If they care about real rape survivors and real suffering. They will see how their views are harmful. Maybe they’ll even learn some real compassion.
(trigger warning)
My hands shake, and tears run down my face as I type. It’s painful to do so but I know if I don’t get it out it will rot my soul. All the things I hyper focused on to get me through that day, that girls face is one of them. As is the way her body moved in my blurry vision as she turned out the door and her voices echo’s in my ears as she apologizes and the thud of the door closing makes my heart stop. I wait and I wait, heart beating faster, there must be some sound. Foot steps coming, a loud knocking on the door, sirens, something, but there is nothing. The cement floor is cold and dirty of that bathroom. There are dead falls leaves on the floor of it because someone left the door propped opened and then blew in. their brown and crispy and focus on the wave the veins of them go through out the leaves. It had been raining and there are muddy shoes prints on the cement. The tread of HIS shoe has a diamond pattern on it. A pattern I can now draw in my sleep because of how long I stared, memorizing all the lines just to focus on anything but the pain.
He had slapped me and my teeth cut the inside of my bottom lip. Blood drips down from it and onto the dirty floor. five drips, five drips exactly, before he moved me and the blood smeared on the floor. I don’t dare look myself in the many bathroom mirrors. I don’t dare look at his face because I know what demon is going to look back at me. I look at anything else I possibly can incase these are my last moments I get to look at anything and I’ll be damned if the last thing I see in this world is him.
After it’s done I lay there for a while and watch the blood dry. I’m hurting but I’m not crying and I don’t understand why I’m not crying. I’m cold, I know that I’m cold because I can see my breath in air and I’m nude laying on this cement floor, but I don’t feel the cold. It takes me three days to realize I’m in shock. Now the things that haunt my day to day nightmares are not always the things that were done to me, but things I focused on to survive. They linger like the scars he left. Scars on the brain. I still wonder how long it will be before that stops. before I don’t smell the leaves, see the thread of that shoe print, watch my blood drip, or see pale skin, white blondish hair and blue eyes walking away from me, and here the slam of the door like a gunshot. How long until I close my eyes and I don’t see that.
I guess I had more weighing on my chest about this then I thought.
More like throwing them away with bathwater, I’d say.
I don’t buy Posie Parker Picked A Peck Of Pickle Peppers’s story for a second, but this does underscore one truism of the internet: with so much information available, it really is incumbent upon everybody to do a little bit of homework with respect to engagement and opinions. Odds are Pickle Pepper here knew exactly who JF Gariepy was and knew it would get attention. Nobody buys ignorance as an excuse anymore, not when Google is powerful enough to read minds.
There was another story I saw blowing up upon my return to Twitter, which was Contrapoints upsetting non-binary folks by having trans porn star Buck Angel cameo in her latest video on “Opulence”. Buck being a “transmedicalist” had the Twitter pile-on going so vehemently that I really am baffled by why they hope to achieve by tearing Natalie down. It had me reflecting on why I so rarely engage people directly on Twitter: I’m not one for dog-piles.
Sorta on the same wavelength was the story that Air Canada would be using “Welcome Everybody” instead of “Ladies and Gentlemen” to greet passengers onboard flights, in deference to non-binary travelers. Now Air Canada does indeed suck for other reasons, but the triggered right-wingers were nothing short of delicious. I had to point out that even a cartoon character who debuted a quarter-century ago knows the score:
@Lainy
I’m so sorry you suffered that traumatic experience. And I’m sorry it continues to hurt you today. May you have healing and peace.
@WWTH
Judging by the way TERFs have acted before, my guess is they see any cis LGB people harmed as collateral damage. They, like the alt right, are willing to harm themselves so long as it harms others as well (i.e. “to own the libs”).
I absolutely DID confuse Posie Parker with Parker Posey when I saw the title of this article in my email and had a few seconds of extreme disappointment. Whew, crisis averted, I can safely continue to enjoy Christopher Guest mockumentaries.
Sometimes I do wonder though how many terfs that speak for lesbian women are actually lesbians. It just be really ironic if it was a bunch of straight women talking about how lesbian women feel about certain things.
@Lainy
Well, I know of a number of cis male TERFs who claim to speak for cis women, so it wouldn’t be that surprising if they have straight women speaking for lesbians. The majority of lesbians I know are supportive of trans* folks, and the majority of transphobes I know are cishet men (with a few cishet women).
@sarah_kay_gee
I had the exact same thought.
@Katamount – just fixing your link to the Air Canada story – here
Yes the majority of lesbians I know are supportive of trans people as well. And I know there is bound to be some that are not because that’s how people work, but I can’t imagine it’s wide numbers like everyone seems to think it is. The way a lot of it is framed that it’s lesbians against trans women. It bothers me because there is still that idea that lesbian women are dangerous to straight women so I just can’t imagine mass numbers of lesbians turning around and throwing the same stereotype at trans people.
@Lainy – so much sympathies. And what an absolute coward the other person was! I hope their decision still haunts them TBH.
Re: lesbian vs. trans folks politics. Yeah, my experience as well has been that the strongest support I get from cis folks is from cis lesbians, especially from those who defy gender conventions themselves. They deal with a lot of the same oppressions we do, and I wish more trans women would treat them nicely. And there’s discourse to be had IMO around the inherent binarism of cis vs. trans, and how blanket distrust of cis people can perpetuate oppression.
And yeah I’m completely not surprised by a TERF allying with open white supremacists. Transphobia in feminism tends to come out of a lot of the same stuff that sees Black people as predatory, and Black women as “not real women”.
OTOH from what I’ve seen, TERFs farther on the left – not transphobic liberals, rather MLM aligned ones like Meghan Murphy – are in fact very loud and effective feminists. And one of the things that really bothers me about this, is that I’ve gotten to associate terms like “anti-rape” with people who are anti-trans and anti-sex-worker, because of their domination of more radical anti-abuser discourse; and also because the intersectional left is IME fucking terrible at handling abusers within its own collective ranks.
IDK. That militant willingness to judge and to harm others, the same stuff that helps us root out abusers and protect each other, also seems very easy itself to corrupt into bigotry and systematized abuse. (Including child abuse, if you look at some of the stuff TERFs do online.) I really don’t know a solution.
Sorry for the ramble, just feeling exhausted and cynical.