The Green Party says
the government should stop British anti-transgender activist Kellie-Jay
Keen-Minshull from visiting New Zealand.
Well, technically she’s a women’s rights
activist who takes issue with transgender women’s rights usurping those of
biological women, and fair enough given the upsets that transgender women are
causing. But have women’s rights’ chickens have
come home to roost?
Women successfully demanded the right to join men’s
clubs and pushed female students into STEM careers, issuing mantras like ‘women
can do anything’, but now have to contest their new-found liberties with
biological males calling themselves women.
Women-only spaces once inviolable - sports, changing rooms, waiting
rooms, hospital wards, prisons, body-searches, toilets – have to be shared with
people born male and of greater size and strength. The fox is calling himself a chicken and
demanding entry into the hen-house. Belatedly, prison services and sports bodies are redrawing
the rules, playing catch-up with the power of a tiny proportion of influential
activists.
Support for ‘trans rights’ are so widespread
throughout media and with far-Left political commentators, that Keen-Minshull
didn’t stand much of a chance, The Green Party warned of violent clashes and
they delivered, but instead of opposing any fascist groups
supporting her, they attacked her and her moderate message.
This was a success for the Greens’ suppression of free speech, but their reputation is mixed. They described the Immigration Service’s 2004 refusal to permit the entry of Holocaust-denier David Irving as setting “a bad precedent for free speech in this country.” So they approve of an anti-Semite’s right to speak, but not those of a women’s rights activist. It seems, too, that they avoided directly alienating the fascists who supported her. There’s a deeply unpleasant message there, that the Greens cannot be relied upon to support Western freedoms and democratic socialism, or to antagonise the extreme Right.
“Really, it’s got even worse now, secular humanists have gone full-woke as far as I can tell and that’s really going to alienate a lot of people.”
Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society
Closer to my head and heart than the
Greens, The New Zealand Humanists have written a letter
to Minister of Immigration Michael Wood asking him to “consider denying any
visa application or revocation of any previously granted visa to Keen-Minshull
and anyone associated with organising the Let Women Speak event.”
One would have thought that the right to
speak freely of one’s conscience would be sacrosanct to Humanists, but their
concerns were of “risk and threat to public order and the public interest.” Public interest? That really didn’t get a look in, and the
Humanists and the Greens share a malignant responsibility for its rejection. The Humanists’ manifesto claims
it to be “committed to diversity, and respect those of differing yet humane
views”, unless, it seems, where women’s rights impinge on the rights of those
few born male who wish aggressively to assert their ‘womanhood’.
The letter’s false claims of “her hateful message” and her inadvertent association with neo-nazis belies the reality that the rise of far Right extremism has its roots in the reaction to the rise of far-Left ideology. Were the far-Left to dial back on its own extremism, the far-Right would disappear back into the shadows. The Left has a lot to answer for since it left the Left.
