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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@Bina
In fact, intersex children are routinely surgically mutilated at birth, but TERFs seem fine with that.
Buck Angel is a bigot who outed Lana Wachowski against her will, and Contrapoints absolutely deserves whatever she gets as a result of working with him.
What people want is for Natalie to stop palling around with reactionaries that spread hate speech. Imagine if she had Blaire White do voices for her videos, would you be ok with that? Because that’s the direction she’s heading.
*slides a Purrli over to Lainy as a distraction from bad memories*
I don’t recall if you ever said you have/had a cat, but this is a decent substitute whenever you need exposure to emergency purrfection and your cat can’t be near for whatever reason.
@betrayer
She tried to have a live event with Blaire White a while ago. It got cancelled. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to have Blaire White guest. Blaire White is awful and anyone should notice that, but it seems Natalie is more interested in shocking people than anything else. She’s a shock jock at this point.
Posie Parker said that trans men should be sterilised. Not sure whether it was a proposed punishment for our betrayal of the sisterhood or a solution to the onerous burden of having to say “pregnant people”. But with attitudes like that, you can see why she was quite comfortable chatting to a Nazi.
@Nick Kiddle
I’m guessing it’s the former. TERFs, much like conservatives, are mostly interested in regulations and laws for the purpose of punishing people they don’t like.
@Lainy
I’m sorry that happened to you. It sounds terrible and no one should ever have to experience something like that.
I don’t want to overstep my bounds or sound dismissive here, I would also like to add that I haven’t been sexually assaulted before. However, I was raised by both a malignant narcissist and a victimized narcissist, and had other abusive figures throughout my life so I know a little bit about trauma. Still I can only relay to you what I have learned from my experience, and I’m not sure how it will apply to your case.
It’s okay to learn how to stand up for yourself and fight back. It’s also okay to try and stand up for others who can’t fight back, for one reason or the other. But make no mistake: the ability to do so, does not stem from trauma and trying to connect both might be harmful to your mental and/or emotional health.
The idea that you needed such a horrible experience to lose hope in humanity, and start fighting back would seem to almost justify the evil and apathy you were subject to. And I get that you in no way wished for such a thing to happen to you, and you’re just trying to make sense of the world around you with what you were left with, after what happened.
But you didn’t need such a thing. You did not deserve it. Carrying trauma around can, at first glance, make you feel powerful because all the anger and rage can often numb the pain and sorrow, and provide you with the strength to fight back. But at the same time it sort of makes you have to carry the trauma around as a catalyst for your strength.
You can be strong without trauma, as a matter of fact you already are and you always were. I’m not sure how you can get rid of it, make sense of it, or overcome it, because I’m still sort going through this process myself. Nothing I say is magically going to make it go away, but I do recommend you seek therapy to learn how to better understand and process these feelings.
Hope I did not overstep my bounds or offend you, or anybody else in here. Take care!
I’m surprised that nobody’s mentioned Posie Parker cosying up to the American religious right. One reason TERFs are so loud is that they get a bundle of cash from people like Focus on the Family to produce glossy brochures full of lies. I seem to remember that they’ve mentioned a strategy of trying to split the T from LGB as a first step to going after the LGB.
Sorry, I don’t remember the exact details.
I seem to be seeing two kinds of TERFs. One is the older feminists who used to be great. People like Germaine Greer and Ophelia Benson. I’m deeply disappointed in them.
The other kind is feministsin name only. Posie Parker and friends are activists for women about as much as MRAs work for men.
@betrayer and @Naglfar
I am neither trans nor non-binary, so my opinion amounts to little in this discussion. However, I did find InnuendoStudios venture an analysis of this matter on Curious Cat and found myself agreeing with a great deal of it:
https://curiouscat.me/InnuendoStudios/post/1004730846
Probably the biggest takeaway I’ve had from Natalie’s videos is just how fraught with tension transition can really be, and she lays it bare with every video she does. She’s navigating the waters of her own identity the best she can, and perhaps her level of prominence isn’t conducive to that. Frankly, she shouldn’t have agreed to allow Buck Angel to cameo and hope she learns from this. We’ve all seen her learn from her mistakes, so I’m confident she’ll learn from this one.
Does anyone listen to the Gaslit Nation podcast? They connect the dots between various right wing movements really, really well. And they pick up the big stories before everyone else is paying attention. For example, Ukraine.
Anyway, it’s no coincidence that Nazis and evangelicals and TERFs and the manosphere and the major conservative parties in every country are all blending together.
@Sheila Crosby
I believe I had heard about that somewhere. That doesn’t surprise me, and I’m sure the right likes this deal as well. Not only do they get their ideas out there, but they can use these women as shields from accusations of misogyny (e.g. “We aren’t misogynists! Posie Parker is a feminist, and she’s with us!”) and they can use them to infiltrate spaces that ordinarily would not allow their presence.
They sound quite a bit like MRAs, at least to me. It would be genuinely hard to distinguish MRA quotes (with a few words swapped) and TERF quotes, like that quiz on TERFs vs incels.
@Katamount
My opinion is by no means the only valid one, and there undoubtedly are others who are more immersed in the study of gender and are more qualified than I am to respond to this. However, my thoughts on Innuendo’s analysis:
Innuendo (is this 1 person or a team of people under one name?) is much more forgiving than I am about mistakes. They are correct in noting that Natalie has changed, as people do, in her opinions and that she has apologized for many past mistakes.
I am not very forgiving as a person. I tend to hold long grudges against people that cloud my perception of them. This is probably not a good tendency, and it is likely not the best for my mental health, but it is still a part of my personality. To me, it is hard to forgive when someone repeatedly makes mistakes. Different kinds of mistakes, yes, but it seems many of them demonstrate repeated indifference to a certain group. Time after time, her actions have shown ignorance toward the non-binary community, which has led to a somewhat unsteady relationship between her and that community. I am not accusing Natalie of being transmed or truscum, but I am saying that she does not seem to care that she has agitated this community, and she seems to repeatedly invite people who are known antagonists.
I am not saying not to watch her videos or to avoid her social media, and I am definitely not calling for more people to pile on on Twitter. I am simply saying that I’m through with her, and I will not be continuing to consume her content, as she has wronged the NB community, which already is marginalized even in LGBT spaces, too many times.
Delurking to say holy shit what is with all the hate on sites that seem innocent? I’m not a parent and never want to be so sores like mumsnet don’t enter my sphere of consciousness but how is it such a cesspit of hatred?
I thought it was just a group for parents and would have tips on bedtime routines and parenting advice. Instead it’s a toxic hellhole; transphobia, racism, bigotry, hatred against people with fertility issues…hate does love hate.
I truly believe all TERFs are only a YouTube video away from outright nazism and this proves it.
@Lainy I’m so goddamn sorry you lived that. My heart breaks for you. You’re so strong. If you want them please have my internet hugs and my dogs sweet snores
@WWTH
That sounds insteresting. Mind if we get a link? How long has it been going on?
@Marcelinethevampirequeen
This article explains a bit about how Mumsnet went to the TERFs. It doesn’t talk about the racism and other bigotries, but my guess is those were brought in on the backs of the TERFs.
@WWTH, @Diego Duarte
Gaslit Nation is excellent! I’ll admit I don’t always listen immediately when they come out, because it can be tough to get through (and I often find it frustrating because they make everything seem so obvious and nobody else is covering it).
https://www.patreon.com/gaslit is where I find it, I don’t know if it’s available elsewhere. They do have some content that’s patron-exclusive (including ad-free versions) but you can listen to the episodes without subscribing.
On topic: fuck TERFs. I’m trying to think of something more coherent to say and not really finding it. They’re reactionary assholes who go out of their way to do harm, and if that weren’t bad enough, they make it harder for actual feminists to get work done by making them look worse through association.
“In fact, intersex children are routinely surgically mutilated at birth, but TERFs seem fine with that.”
Fairly radical surgery has always been OK with pretty much everybody as long as the end product of it is ‘better’ (that is, more heteronormative) men and (especially) women. Hormonal meddling is not off the table either, when it’s used for the purpose of producing bodies which society regards as more ‘ideal’ that the bodies produced by nature. I know I’ve told this story before, but I’m repeating it now: I went to school with a very boyish-looking girl whose parents were thinking about having her shot up with estrogen in order to give her a more womanly appearance. They didn’t want her to go through life looking like a beanpole, which sounds harmless enough, except that she was perfectly healthy the way she was and the least of the side effects she would have experienced if she’d been put on an estrogen regimen would have been something like artificially-induced morning sickness — and it would have gotten worse from there. (She could have ended up with high blood pressure or cancer of the ovaries or both, etc., etc.) Fortunately her parents thought better of it in the end, but for a while they were all set to go, for no better reasons than strictly aesthetic ones. So, basically, when somebody comes at me today with some story about teenagers having their body parts chopped off or radically reconfigured or being made to chug-a-lug horrible hormonal cocktails, I’m not impressed. I know perfectly good and well that the same things have been done in the past in pursuit of a different goal, and were not deemed objectionable then — which means that it can’t be the procedures themselves which are at issue, but only what the procedures are for.
Diego,
I listen here
https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com
I’m a newer listener so I’m not sure how long it’s been going. I may go through all the archives eventually though. There are a couple of ads, but nothing invasive.
It’s hilarious how yesterday’s episode warned about how much more open and brazen the Trump regime is going to become about their corruption and then today, Mick Mulvaney admits to quid pro quo.
@Diego
I go to therapy ever other Tuesday, I’m doing okay right now.
To Everyone else
I’m okay really, I think I just needed to get it off my chest.
@Katamount:
Erm … how do I read the contents of this article without letting them run code on my machine?
It just says “Javascript is required” and neither disabling CSS nor View Source seems to expose the article text.
@Surplus
Try this.
@Naglfar: That’s readable without lowering my machine’s security. Thanks. How did you find it?
@ bekabot
Now you’ve reminded me about how Caster Semanya and some other cis women athletes are being treated just because their quite naturally unusually high androgen levels confer a competitive advantage. Yet another example of society trying to police women’s bodies. Some TERFy types even commented on Semanya being big and ‘masculine looking.’ Well, so are the Williams sisters, in some folks’ view, but nobody is seriously suggesting or even hinting that they might be ‘men in drag.’
@Kevin : you wish. Of course there is plenty of people saying they are men in drag or transexual.
Apart from that, I am not surprised despite the fact they should be enemy. Thoses people are more motivated by their hatred than by the thing they hate.
Also, female TERF are probably my number one thought when anyone say that the world would be more peaceful, less hateful, or anything if it was women who leaded. Turn out that A – power corrupt and B – it’s education and upbringing that count to make you an hateful piece of wood, and not gender, skin color, or other genetical trait.
@Surplus
I just pasted the contents of the page into pastebin.
@WWTH
That and yesterday William Barr went to Notre Dame university and said non-christians can go to hell. It seems their strategy is to own everything they’ve done and then say “so what?!”
Hoping it doesn’t pay off because, more often than not, this is the crossroad that will decide whether Rule of Law will prevail or whether you will spiral down into an open dictatorship. One where elections are extremely rigged, or don’t even take place.