Kellie-Jay & the Neo-Nazis Listener Transcript
If you spot any issues or typos, as far as I’m concerned, you’re free to repost this with corrections wherever you want. I typed this up to make it easier to skim for people who don’t have two hours, or who can’t or don’t like listening to things, to pull quotes from more easily, to spread around to audiences that might not otherwise click on the original vid. Here is that original vid, by the way: https://youtu.be/JBy93QX7ysE
And here’s the transcript:
Shaun: Hello, everyone. Today I'd like to talk about something that happened a few months ago at the event titled Let Women Speak that was held in Melbourne on the 18th of March. If you've seen my video “JK Rowling's New Friends,” you'll know that Let Women Speak is an event organized by controversial UK campaigner Posie Parker, also known as Kellie-Jay Keen.
Shaun: Starting out in the UK, Let Women Speak has gone global, with Keen flying all over the world to attend events. Let Women Speak has a simple format: Keen will turn up somewhere with a microphone, give a speech, and then hand the mic off to anyone who wants it, with the only rule being that women speak first and men speak after.
Shaun: The events also have an open door policy with regards to attendees and speakers. Keen is a single issue campaigner and has gone to great lengths to communicate that she's willing to team up with anyone at all, so long as they agree with her on the single issue she's concerned with. As a result of this open doors policy, in addition to Keen's usual crowd of single-issue campaigners, Let Women Speak events attract lonely people who don't really get what's going on but just want someone to talk to, conspiracy theorist types who want to rant about vaccines or whatever, but also a particular group of people who will turn up anywhere at all that will give them a platform because they've been kicked off all the other platforms: fascists.
Shaun: Keen's Melbourne event was attended by the far right National Socialist Network, a fascist group who gave Nazi salutes and chanted “White power,” while carrying a banner that said “Destroy pedo freaks,” so I want to talk about that today, but I also want to talk about something that happened shortly after the rally.
Shaun: Julie Bindel, a UK journalist who I've talked about in the previous video, posted tweets defending the rally, saying that no Nazi on the planet supports women's rights or is sympathetic to feminism, and she also claimed in another tweet that misogynists were using the event to discredit feminists.
Shaun: Now this was confusing for a couple of reasons for me. Firstly, I was confused because Let Women Speak is not a feminist event and Kellie-Jay Keen is not a feminist. She has repeatedly stated she is not a feminist in countless videos and speeches going back years now. And not only is she not a feminist, she's often harshly critical of feminists and feminism and has even gone so far as to argue that in order to save women, feminism has to be abandoned.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I think in order to save women, we will have to abandon feminism. That's what I said: in order to save women, I think we're gonna have to abandon feminism. And I think I'm right.
Shaun: So why would Julie Bindel, professed feminist, be defending Kellie-Jay Keen by falsely giving the impression that she's a feminist?
Shaun: The second confusing thing here is that only a few years ago Julie Bindel was a harsh critic of Keen. She stated that she despises Keen's politics and tactics, that she's motivated by narcissism, bigotry, and ego, her allying with the Christian right is a disaster, and so on. So that's the second thing I want to talk about today: Julie Bindel was previously very critical of Keen's political tactics, but today she's defending her, and Julie Bindel isn't alone in this.
Shaun: Previously relegated to the outskirts of the movement because of her perceived bigotry and extremism, Kellie-Jay Keen has been increasingly welcomed into the mainstream of so-called gender critical feminism. Just recently, Helen Joyce wrote an article about Keen praising her quote “genius,” which was shared on Twitter by JK Rowling.
Shaun: Rowling also wrote in support of the Let Women Speak event in Melbourne, criticizing how the event and Keen were portrayed afterwards in the media. Also, at the suggestion that Keen could take legal action against the media, someone pointed out to Rowling the expense of taking legal action, to which Rowling replied that she's already offered to pay Kellie-Jay Keen's legal fees.
Shaun: So this is my second question: Anyway, why is the mainstream now welcoming Keen, when previously they had shunned her?
Shaun: And there's a third question I'm interested in today: Regardless of whether they'd be let in, why would a neo-Nazi group want to show up to a Let Women Speak event in the first place?As anyone who pays attention to Keen's events will know, the Australian National Socialist movement turning up at the Melbourne event is not a one-off. Members of far-right groups turning up and even getting to speak at Keen's events is a regular occurrence. So why are they coming? Are they just taking any opportunity for attention and the platform, or is there something about Kellie-Jay Keen and her movement that the far-right groups actually want to support?
Shaun: If you look at the history of Let Women Speak, you'll see a pattern emerge. Keen will organize an event, far-right groups or speakers will attend - see Hearts of Oak turning up to her events in the UK, her event in Miami had a speaker who's a member of The Proud Boys. This group of far-right activists turned up to her rally in New Zealand, so on and so forth. As a result of these sorts of associations, in addition to Keen's online associations with white nationalists, Keen will be asked often by women who agree with her otherwise to please distance herself and her movement from those far-right groups and please stop opening the door for fascists, because it's making us all look terrible. And then Keen will say in response:
Kellie-Jay Keen: Whoever's ostracizing everyone, they need to get a grip. I'm not remotely interested in the silly, frivolous, ridiculous, school girl, catty behavior of women. I don't care if you call me a feminist. I don't care if you call me a Nazi. I don't care if you call me right wing. I don't care if you call me a white supremacist. I don't care if you call me racist. I don't care if you're, uh, religious. I don't care if you're an atheist. I don't care if you worship Satan himself. I don't care. I would - I would absolutely literally take the hand of the Devil himself. I will align with whoever I damn well please. I will stand next to the Devil himself. I've said this before, I will stand beside the Devil himself.
Shaun: You can feel Keen's frustration as she repeatedly has to restate that she will absolutely team up with anyone, and every time she's met by skeptical women saying “Well surely by ‘anyone,’ you don't actually mean anyone,” and Keen has to, again, say “No, anyone. Anyone. The Devil himself.” And Kellie-Jay Keen has a message for those women who keep questioning her tactics.
Kellie-Jay Keen: And if women aren't doing it directly, if they're not doing it directly, they’re strangling us in other ways. They're trying to silence us: “Not quite the right message.” “Not working with the right people.” “Not talking to the right people.” Each and every one of you women who stand in my way - each and every one of you - let me just tell you you will be annihilated.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Because I genuinely don't lose.
Shaun: So what single issue could possibly be so important as to justify teaming up with the Devil himself and annihilating all who stand in your way? Well Posie Parker, Kellie-Jay Keen, is opposed to trans rights. She is a transphobe. Now let me hit pause here for a second. I called her a transphobe, because she herself says she is a transphobe and is happy to be labeled a transphobe.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Everything is transphobic nowadays, which is why I'm happy to be called a transphobe, and in the fullness of time I will be proven right, because I always am. There is precious little I'm not right about ever. Precious precious little that I am not right about, and there is absolutely nothing that I lose.
Shaun: I have to make this clear here, because if you call someone a transphobe, you can get bogged down in debates about what transphobia is, usually with people who would never admit anything was transphobic, even someone outright saying something like “I hope trans people die.” So just to cut that off right here, that was Kellie-Jay Keen herself saying she's happy to be labeled a transphobe, so me and her are in complete agreement there.
Shaun: So okay, Keen is a transphobe, but that obviously means something different for me than it does for her, right? For me it means that she hates trans people and opposes trans rights but what does it mean for her?
Kellie-Jay Keen: Really, it - look, I'm in this - this is - this is why we're all worried, I suspect, about the trans movement. I’m worried about women's rights and I'm worried about children's bodies. And all the other stuff that comes with that, I'm not quite so worried about. Um, but you know my my focus, my absolute focus, which is clearly transphobic, is - is pro-women.
Shaun: So Kellie-Jay Keen's whole campaign is based on these two ostensible motivations: protecting children's bodies and protecting women's rights. By protecting children, she means from the supposed dangers of transgender ideology. If trans people are socially accepted, that might lead to more young people wanting to transition, and that might lead to them going on puberty blockers or undergoing surgeries. Keen talks repeatedly about the possible side effects of medical transition as well as the minority of detransitioners; people who transition and then later detransition.
Shaun: Keen is particularly concerned about the possible effects of puberty blockers upon children's later fertility. That's just something to remember, there.
Shaun: Additionally, Keen uses some very tortured logic to try to make connections between trans people and pedophilia in a manner that's very reminiscent of homophobic claims about gay people. By protecting women's rights, she primarily means by excluding trans people from what she considers to be women's spaces. Spaces like women's restrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, and the like. Now I acknowledge that Keen wouldn't accept me saying “trans people” here. She would say she's motivated by keeping men out of women's spaces, but as we'll see, she doesn't really mean “men.” She does mean trans people.
Shaun: And something else to remember here is that by protecting women's rights, she actually means just her personal interpretation of this one singular right, because as we'll also see, she's perfectly willing to give up other women's rights in pursuit of her single issue. She is less of a women's rights campaigner and more of a women's right campaigner.
Shaun: This single issue approach to activism has divided the anti-trans crowd into two camps as Keen moves from the outskirts to the mainstream of the anti-trans world. Whether one is a supporter or critic of her style of activism has become the question to answer in the anti-trans community. The group opposed to Keen are the more liberal academic anti-trans campaigners. These are self-styled gender-critical radical feminists. They read theory, they author articles in broadsheet newspapers, they give talks at universities, publish books and all that stuff. When it comes to pushing back against trans rights, this group plays a subtler game than Keen. This is the crowd who talk about just having a few concerns. They present themselves as the adults in the room. They're aware of the need for good optics. They want to be seen to have won the argument legitimately. They work very hard to convey that they're not motivated by bigotry, they're not motivated by transphobia: They just have a few concerns. As a political strategy, they will be accepting of a minority of trans people. They will often name and gender trans people correctly, for instance, but they'll draw a distinction between what they see as true trans people and confused bandwagon jumpers getting swept up in a trend.
Shaun: As such, they will promote the voices of transgender people like Debbie Hayton, who opposes gender self-identification. They can point to Hayton and say “See, even some trans people have valid concerns about trans rights.” They use Hayton and people like her to attempt to divide trans people as a group between what they see as the true trans people and the fake trans people. They see having a few Debbie Haytons around as an acceptable trade-off for dividing their opposition and achieving their political goals.
Shaun: This group of campaigners cannot stand Kellie-Jay Keen. You see, Keen openly denies the existence of transness outright. There are no trans people in Keen's world. She doesn't believe in trans people or trans rights, which is probably why she's happy to be called transphobic. For Keen, all trans women are creepy men in dresses motivated by sick sexual perversions and all trans men are self-hating insane women who want to cut their breasts off because of internalized misogyny. That's it. Zero exceptions, including the likes of Debbie Hayton, who Keen has a particular animosity for. Keen repeatedly dead names and misgenders Hayton like she does for all trans people she refers to, and she harshly criticizes anyone in the gender critical crowd who's willing to tolerate being around someone who she endlessly and loudly proclaims to be a creepy pervert man occupying women-only spaces.
Shaun: Kellie-Jay “I’m happy to be called a transphobe” Keen is a nightmare for the anti-trans campaigners who are concerned about optics. The fundamental divide here is that Keen takes a no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity approach to activism. For her, the only problem is that not enough people have heard about all the evil trans people and all the terrible things they're doing. “If more people knew what I knew,” she thinks, “they'd be rioting in the streets!” The argument is already won, as far as Keen is concerned. It isn't even really an argument, so optics don't matter. All that matters is attention. “Everyone knows trans people aren't real,“ Keen thinks, “and the only reason you'd say different is if you're either insane, a lying pervert trying to sneak into a woman's locker room, or you're just too afraid to admit what you really think.”
Shaun: She talks frequently about the silent majority who agree with her, and low turnout at her events never conveys that few people agree with her, of course. Only that there's a fear of turning up. And in fact, the fewer people who turn up just goes to prove how frightened the silent majority must be of speaking up.
Shaun: However the problem for Keen, and for the other anti-trans campaigners whether they agree with her or not, is that she's wrong. optics do matter. Not everyone already agrees with her. There isn't a silent majority just waiting for the opportunity to speak up. Not all attention is good attention, here. Attention that comes at the expense of associating your movement with fascists and neo-Nazis is bad attention, because whatever concern might exist in the silent majority about things like puberty blockers or women's sports, they're also so concerned about neo-Nazis.
Shaun: Opposition to trans rights might be a single issue for Kellie-Jay Keen, but despite what she thinks, it isn't for the vast majority of society.
Shaun: Another optics problem for the gender critical feminist crowd is that Keen refuses to call herself a feminist. She takes a very personal and furious approach to responding to criticism coming from feminists, and herself is harshly critical of what she sees as feminism failing women. All those fancy academic feminists should have pushed back against trans rights harder and sooner, she says, and she carries an enormous grudge against them for being, as she sees it, asleep at their posts. So Kellie-Jay Keen can't play nice with the other transphobes and keeps trashing their political strategies. And let's take a look at an example of this in action. So in a video posted after the Melbourne rally, Keen attempts to sow doubt over the legitimacy of the neo-Nazi group who turned up to support her, suggesting it may have been a false flag operation.
Kellie-Jay Keen: And I just - something about all of this doesn't make any sense. It feels really off. I don't think it's beyond the wit of anyone to think that that either was, uh, TRAs (note: Trans Rights Activists) dressed up, or police, or just - something was just off there.
Shaun: Now, I find this a particularly audacious claim because a couple of months before the rally in January, Keen was actually told that far-right groups were going to turn up to her events and it was recorded.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I don’t, and I don't think, uh, I would be really shocked if we suddenly come to Australia and then a load of really vile nefarious racist people turn up and actually take the platform and the microphone, um, and if they do -
Interlocutor: But they do turn up. That's the problem. They do turn up. They have been turning up to events in Australia.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Oh, and what? They make speeches?
Interlocutor: No but, but they do turn up to the events. You know that, right? You are aware of that - that problem?
Kellie-Jay Keen: (sputters) People are free to turn up wherever they like. At Speaker's Corner -
Interlocutor: I'm just saying you're aware that they've been turning up to trans events in Australia, correct?
Kellie-Jay Keen: So they take the microphone - which is unlikely, because it's mostly women that speak - but even if they do, it's a free speech event. It’s free for you to turn your backs on them, and say “we disagree, “ and shout, because that’s the way -
Interlocutor: (overlapping) Would you disagree with them - so you would disavow that - that speech -
Kellie-Jay Keen: I don't disavow anybody. I would disavow - I will disavow words if I disagree with them, and I hear them, but I won't disavow someone for thoughts that they have in their head. No.
Interlocutor: Well. Well these are the things that are my concern, because, um, at the community in Florida, I think, when you were there, a - an ex-Proud Boy member that the locals knew - didn't say anything, he just said, “I don't like transing kids,” but the media there had a field day. Because they know him.
Kellie-Jay Keen: They didn't have a field day. It didn't make the news. It might have been in, like, lefty print media, but so! So what. So a man that that has potentially unpalatable views about something else spoke and said he doesn't like transing kids. So what?
Shaun: That's a group of Australian anti-trans radical feminist campaigners there trying to convey to Keen in a Twitter Spaces ahead of her Australia trip that far-right groups are going to turn up to her events. Their worry, which proved to be extremely prescient, is that if Keen lets a bunch of far-right fascists turn up to her events, people will afterwards associate gender critical feminism with fascism. Associating with fascists hands free ammunition to their political opponents, who can now say with evidence Keen provided to them, “Don't listen to that lot. They're friends with the neo-Nazis.”
Shaun: And Keen's answer on receiving this warning is to say, “So what if they turn up, it's a free speech event.” She also brought this warning up in some of her January live streams where she doubled down on her policy that anyone is encouraged to attend her events.
Kellie-Jay Keen: No. I just wanna - let's go over this again. Every single woman, whatever her views, is welcome at a Let Women Speak event. Every single man, no matter what his views are, are welcome at a Let Women Speak event. We are allowing anyone to speak, anyone to attend. We don't disavow, we don't police, we don't verify people at our events. We absolutely know that some people come to the events that have thoughts in their heads I don't agree with. It's amazing! And you know what? I'm such a big fat grown-up that I can put up with it. You may fear guilt by association. I don’t.
Shaun: This is why it's particularly cheeky of Keen to try and suggest the possibility of the fascist group being false flag actors in disguise. Because she was told they were going to turn up beforehand, and she said, “So what? Everyone's welcome to my events.”
Shaun: In the wake of this event and Keen's disastrous failed attempt to tour New Zealand, the group Feminist Left Australia put out an article analyzing the effects of her trip, coming to the conclusion that her visit had set their struggle back substantially, because gender critical feminism in Australia is now associated with Nazism. And I quote, “It is quite simple: if KJK did not take a single issue approach to her activism focusing solely on transgenderism, rather than on women's rights as a whole, and had not spent the past few years cozying up to the extreme right, the NSN would not have come to the rally. KJK thus bears much of the responsibility for the association of gender-critical feminism with Nazism in Australia due to her failure to distance herself from the NSN.” So good job to Kellie-Jay there, well done.
Shaun: Keen herself often takes a plausibly deniable approach to cozying up to the far right, a little bit like how Matt Walsh will openly call himself a fascist as a fake joke. You know, if you criticize me, well, I was just joking, you see. But if you happen to agree with me, well then I wasn't actually joking at all, I'm deadly serious. One of Keen's social media profile pictures is a Barbie in a Nazi uniform, for instance, and she's also fond of saying things like this:
Kellie-Jay Keen: Often I'm accused of being - buddying up to certain far-right groups. Where are you boys? I thought we were friends!
Kellie-Jay Keen: “Fascist” is the new word for legend.
Shaun: Every time she gets any pushback for flirting with fascism she'll say, “Oh, don't take everything so seriously. I’m only joking, of course.” But in addition to “only joking,” she does actually want very much for the other far-right groups to attend her events.
Shaun: One funny aspect to all this is that Keen is confused by the rejection of the more liberal academic radical feminists. She mistakenly believes that they don't like her because she is, as she claims, “working class” - which in her colloquial non-Marxist understanding of class is absolutely laughable, as an aside - but it's actually because she's letting Nazis paint swastikas all over their political project. They put a lot of effort into their attempts to not be seen as transphobic, and then Keen turns up with her fascist friends and says, “No, we are transphobic. We are opposed to trans rights. I'm going to dead name and misgender every trans person I talk about, even trans people who are currently helping us, like Debbie Hayton, and if you've got a problem with that, I'm going to annihilate you. And then after all that she's like, “Why don't they like me? It must be because I'm working class.” It's amazing. So Keen's single issue activism has something of a strategy problem for the more respectable transphobes, but there's another problem with her single issue activism, and it's that her stated justifications for it don't actually make any sense.
Shaun: So one issue with Keen's activism is that her single issue anti-trans approach to women's rights is causing her to ally herself and her cause with people who oppose abortion. She will support politicians based solely on their regressive stance on trans rights even if they also support efforts to outlaw abortion, and those two things often come hand in hand. Of course, for instance, if you've watched my previous videos, you'll know that she invited the anti-abortion politician baroness Emma Nicholson to speak at one of her events, and also that she's a member of Hands Across the Aisle, an organization founded by two anti-abortion activists. She sung the praises of conservative politicians who oppose abortion, and she even supported Donald Trump in the last presidential election. Her Australian trip was in part funded by CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, a group whose chairman, Matt Schlapp, once stated that an abortion ban would be an answer to the racist Great Replacement myth. And Keen also has other ties to U.S. anti-abortion activists, which we'll talk about in due time.
Shaun: Now Keen's willingness to give up abortion rights is not left to the reader's imagination, here. She is explicit about it, once stating outright that the right to a legal abortion would be quote “worth setting aside.” And on the day before the last U.S presidential election, Keen endorsed Donald Trump with the following justification.
Kellie-Jay Keen: If I'm gonna lay my cards on the table, I would like to wake up tomorrow without any change in the presidency. And I know I'm not supposed to say that, because that instantly makes me a white nationalist, and a racist, and a terrible person, but that's what I hope. For I think if it comes down to reproductive rights for women or the right to say who we are and what we are, I mean, the latter is far more important. I think you can win reproductive rights back. I don't even know if there's a general appetite in America to take them away.
Shaun: Now it should be noted here that Keen also personally supports a particular restriction on abortion. She wants to scrap Gillick competence.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I've often talked about consent, and how I'm very fearful about consent, and how I think Gillick is the key to that. How it gets misused and appropriated in other areas of law and, I think that we really need to look back at that. Like, why. Why are we enabling children to take, um, sometimes contraceptives that - that are quite harmful, or access to abortion? Um, I think that we really need to rethink all of this. I think parents need to take back control of their children.
Shaun: So okay, Wikipedia description for people who don't know: Gillick competence is a term originating in England and Wales, and it's used in medical law to decide whether a child - a person under sixteen years of age - is able to consent to their own medical treatment without the need for parental permission or knowledge. This particular case was about contraception, but of course it has effects in other areas of health. Imagine, say, a fifteen year old who wants to get vaccinated against a deadly disease, but their parents think George Soros is putting demonic microchips in vaccines. Now do we think that child should have the right to consent to their own health care without parental permission? I would say yes, definitely, but Kellie-Jay Keen says “No, parents need to take back control of their children.”
Shaun: This ends up being a restriction on particular abortions, because minors wouldn't be able to get abortions without parental consent or permission, This would, in cases where anti-abortion parents refuse to give consent, either force minors to carry pregnancies to term or cause them to seek out unsafe abortions. Keen often states that she is pro-choice and I think she probably legitimately believes that she is, but that's just inside her own head, of course. Outside of her own head, she is a single issue campaigner, so what she personally thinks of abortion doesn't really matter: She's more than willing to sacrifice that right at the altar of her anti-trans campaign.
Shaun: So there's a few things to say about this. The first is that the claim that Keen is a women's rights campaigner is not true. She is willing to trade away women's rights that they already have. And a lot of hay has been made about the fact that Keen claims to be fighting for women's rights, but is also willing to give up women's rights because that's an obvious hypocrisy, right? Worth noting here, though, is that Keen's willingness to team up with anti-abortion activists and support anti-abortion politicians also conflicts with her positions on child safety and her stated worries about the effects of medical transition on young people's health, because Keen is willing to work with anti-abortion extremists who oppose abortion even in cases of rape, or where there's a significant threat to the health of the pregnant person, or even in cases where the person seeking an abortion is a child.
Shaun: And these are not merely theoretical possibilities. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the state of Ohio instituted a ban on all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and of course, many people don't even know that they're pregnant until after six weeks of pregnancy. One result of this ban was that a ten year old girl who'd been raped had to travel out of state in order to get an abortion. Now if she couldn't travel, or if such a limitation on abortions was instituted on a national level, that girl would have been legally required to go through pregnancy at ten years old, with all the associated health risks that brings, and give birth to her rapist’s child.
Shaun: And I should note here that Keen knows how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth can be. She's talked generally about the complications that can arise during pregnancy, but she also talks frequently about one of her own pregnancies which resulted in a difficult birth that saw her and her child having to be resuscitated afterwards. And that's for an adult woman! There are additional dangers that come with someone being pregnant as a minor. Abortion bans kill people. You may recall the death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland who died from sepsis after her request for an abortion was denied even though miscarriage was unavoidable in that case. These are the sorts of things that happen if abortion is outlawed.
Shaun: And something else to keep in mind here are all the health risks that come with carrying out unsafe abortions, which of course many women and girls are forced to seek out in places where abortion is banned, but Kellie-Jay Keen thinks abortion rights are worth setting aside. Keen often hides behind her daughter in discussions about trans women accessing women's spaces. “Why should my daughter have to see a quote ‘man’ in her changing room?” she asks. Well, I have a question for Keen in a similar vein: Would you want girls like your daughter to have their abortion rights taken away? To go to prison for seeking illegal unsafe abortions? To be left to die without medical care because doctors are legally forbidden from terminating even an unviable pregnancy that's killing them? Because that's what your anti-abortion allies want to bring about. That's what you think is worth trading away.
Shaun: Keen’s strategy is to say “I think children are being hurt by this trans issue, so this is the most important thing, and we can forgo everything else in the meantime,” but this doesn't make sense, of course, because what she's willing to give up for this single issue will lead to children being hurt. In the instance of giving up abortion rights, children would be forced to carry dangerous pregnancies to term or seek unsafe abortions, so why does Keen not think those children are worthy of a single issue campaign? Why not put everything else on hold until those children are safe? You know, she's claiming to be trying to save children from danger but she's willing to shove other children into danger in pursuit of that goal.
Shaun: Keen misunderstands why people criticize her for teaming up with anti-abortion activists. Whenever she talks about this, she makes it seem as though the worry is that she personally will be persuaded by their arguments and become anti-abortion in her own mind. “Do not worry,” she reassures her audience, “My mind is made up. There's no way their arguments will sway me,” but this is a very self-centered view.
Shaun: Of course it doesn't really matter what Keen thinks about abortion personally. What matters is what she does. She has a platform and an audience and, regardless of her own opinions about abortion, what she does is let people working to restrict abortion rights onto that platform and hands them a microphone.
Shaun: Of course this is just one way in which Kellie-Jay Keen’s claimed motivations for her single issue activism don't make sense. There are many others that I could list here, and I'm going to. So another way all this doesn't make sense is Keen's focus on child sexual abuse. Now what Keen says she believes is that being trans is primarily an atypical sexual fetish and people who have one atypical sexual fetish are likely to have more. Thus trans people are more likely to be pedophiles in her view. This is, of course, the exact same false narrative homophobes used to attack gay rights and has long been employed to try to keep gay people out of certain spaces and jobs, and so on.
Shaun: These are dangerous narratives, not just for their effect upon LGBT people but because they work to obscure the much more common ways that abuse is often carried out. But also in terms of Kellie-Jay Keen's single issue activism, her support for any politician or political party who aligns with her in opposition to trans rights has caused her to support not just politicians who have had child abuse allegations made about them, but also the Republican party in general in the United States, which is the party that fights to keep child marriage legal. So I suppose we could ask why child brides aren't worthy of a Kellie-Jay Keen single issue campaign.
Shaun: But there's something else I want to highlight here. If you've seen my video “JK Rowling's New Friends,” you'll know that Kellie-Jay Keen has worked with the group Hands Across the Aisle, an organization trying to unite anti-trans radical feminists and conservative Christians in order to oppose trans rights. Hands Across the Aisle claims Keen as a member. They fundraised to support her activism, and Keen is friendly on Twitter with the founder of the group, Kaeley Triller. So Kaeley Triller used to work as a residential treatment counselor for juvenile delinquent males between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. While she was there, she entered into what she calls a “relationship” with one of the minors who was once part of the program. She calls this a “chemical attraction” that she didn't know how to break. Following this relationship. Child Protective Services got involved and issued a strike against Triller. She lost her job and she also became pregnant by the minor that she was once supposed to be a counselor for. Triller describes the resulting pregnancy as God’s answer to her prayers. And it should be noted here that these aren't mere allegations made against Triller: The reason I'm able to quote her words about this is that she's confessed to it openly.
Shaun: So the first point I want to make about this is that if Kaeley Triller was trans, Kellie-Jay Keen would be ranting and raving about this incident for weeks on stream. She would be outraged about the trans counselor who abused their position of authority to gain access to vulnerable minors, weaving the incident into her grand narrative of trans criminality, but since Kaeley Triller isn't trans and is a friend of hers, the incident gets ignored.
Shaun: I didn't bring all this up in the JK Rowling video because I didn't have anything to directly tie Triller to Rowling, so it seemed a bit tangential, but I do now. So in January of this year, Triller said she loved JK Rowling on Twitter, to which Rowling replies “Just followed you. Welcome to my club. Kiss.” “Quite possibly the highlight of my Twitter career. Thank you! Stay strong. Heart.” “And you, sister. Kiss.” These tweets are still online as of the posting of this video, by the way.
Shaun: And in relation to that, I’d like to answer a few responses I got to the Rowling video. In that video, I criticized Rowling for not going and deleting her old tweets where she praises people who turn out to be anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, openly threatening violence, or whatever else, and a few Rowling fans didn't like that. They said, “Oh come on, we can't really expect her to go back through her old social media posts when she learns things like that. We can't judge her opinions just for not deleting some old tweets.” Well something I should have mentioned at the time is that JK Rowling does go back and delete tweets where she's praised people, once they declare their support for trans rights. That, for instance, Rowling posted praise for fellow author Stephen King until King tweeted his support for trans rights, at which point Rowling's tweets praising King mysteriously disappeared.
Shaun: Ooh spooky! Maybe a ghost deleted them. No, JK Rowling just doesn't care if you're anti-abortion or anti-gay rights, or you post violent threats, or you do the kinds of things Kaeley Triller did, but if you support trans rights, that she will take as an insult.
Shaun: Anyway back to Kellie-Jay Keen. Keen talks about Kaeley Triller in her videos, referring to her as a friend, and she even cites her advice in a video that's supposed to be about child safety, if you can believe it.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Um a friend of mine on Facebook called Kaeley, um, Triller Harms (Note: “Harms” seems to be Triller’s married name.) What she talks about is parents in America sitting in - so not doing a sit out, but sitting in - in the classrooms and demanding that they see the materials.
Shaun: And I know what the response to this will be from Keen's fans. They'll say, “Oh well, maybe she just doesn't know about Triller's history,” but no, she does and I can prove that.
Shaun: So on September 27, 2017, the account transadvocate on Twitter shared Triller's confession alongside an additional allegation; that being that Triller had engaged in doxing. Kellie-Jay Keen jumps into the replies to defend her friend, but strangely chooses only to respond to the doxing allegation, saying that Triller never doxed anyone. Further down on the responses to this tweet, transadvocate says to Keen, “I’m not the one defending someone who has sex with vulnerable kids who are under her care. That's all you,” to which Keen responds, “Transing children is abuse,” etc.
Shaun: This exchange is interesting in a couple of ways. Firstly, it proves that Keen knows about what her friend Kaeley Triller was up to - she just doesn't care. Keen claims to be motivated by concerns about grooming, but when it's her friend in question, she is noticeably unconcerned. Secondly, it's a good example of Keen's never-play-defense style of argument. If she ever runs up against an argument she can't beat, she simply hops to another track and keeps on moving forward. Keen can't defend what Kaeley Triller did directly because it would expose her claim to be motivated by child safety as deeply hypocritical, so she doesn’t. She just steps around it and tries to change the subject: transing children is abuse.
Shaun: Another example of this concerns Keen giving an interview at her Melbourne event to the far right Rebel News correspondent, Avi Yemini, a man who campaigns in support of Tommy Robinson and has also been convicted of harassing and physically assaulting his ex-wife. Keen proudly shared the exclusive interview from the event on Twitter, and when she was challenged over giving an interview to a quote “admitted wife beater,” Keen again ignored the comment and said something irrelevant.
Shaun: Keen's main argumentative tactic is to simply dismiss or ignore what the other person is saying and say what she wants to say instead. I read through her entire Twitter feed and saw her do this hundreds of times at least. But there's no better example, I think than this exchange, where Keen ends up in a protracted argument with gendervalidator, which is a Twitter robot which auto responds to tweets mentioning it. And this really serves to show that arguing with people like Keen with the aim of changing their minds is a largely futile endeavor. Keen literally could not care less what the other person is saying. She doesn't notice that she's arguing with a robot even when it outright says it is a robot, so why would she ever care about whatever arguments or evidence you could present her with? Not that arguing with people like Keen is always pointless, but the game should always be to discredit her in the eyes of onlookers rather than talk her around personally, because that's clearly impossible.
Shaun: Anyway, the next problem I have with Keen's stated motivations for her activism is her claim to be protecting women's spaces. Keen says she's motivated to stop people she calls men from going into women's spaces like toilets and locker rooms, and she also claims to be concerned about women's shortlists for awards, women's sports, grants for women, and things like that. The first issue I have with this position is that Keen has repeatedly advocated for men to go into women's spaces. Most notably, here she's arguing for armed men who agree with her to go into women's toilets, including trying to enter school toilets.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I had a bit of an idea about some of the things that you can do, and men, for once I'm talking to you. I'm talking about you dads who maybe carry - I think that's what you say? I'm so down with the American lingo - maybe you carry, maybe you don’t. Maybe you consider yourself a protector of women, maybe you're that sort of man. Maybe you have a daughter or a mother or a wife, maybe you have a sister, maybe you just have some friends. Maybe you just think women are human and you don't need any absolute connection with them to feel compelled to protect us.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Um, I think you should start using women's toilets, men, because you have every right to self-identify. Clearly don't do it and upset women and girls that are already in there, but just make a point of doing it, and maybe make the women feel okay about you doing it if, you know, if you come out and you frighten someone. Uh, but it's about time that you started using women's toilets and saying that you identify as a woman if stopped, and I think that's how you're going to have - that's one of the many ways that you are going to have to combat the insanity of self ID. Even if it's not called self ID, that's pretty much what you have now in the United States, and that's how you men are going to help.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Uh, and there's going to be no excuses, and you either care about the women and girls in your life, or you don’t, but you are going to start inserting yourselves into spaces that are specifically for women and girls. Uh, maybe you're gonna do it, uh, when you go to your kids’ school, and they've had to inject this federal nonsense of accepting boys into girls’ spaces. Maybe you need to make a point of saying to the head teacher (Note: principal) that you're going to go and use the toilet, and ask where the girls’ toilets are.
Shaun: This is a tactic that Keen has advocated for for a long time. For instance, here's another clip of her arguing that white men should falsely claim to be black women in order to apply for some sort of women-only business grant that her stream chat were talking about.
Kellie-Jay Keen: (reading from screen) “- only for people of color and women owners.” If I were a white male, I would identify as one of these. That is so - oh please, somebody do that. It's systemic racism and sexism - oh please somebody do that. What a fantastic idea! What an absolutely staggeringly wonderful idea! Let's make that happen! Let's do that! Let’s, um - oh come on, let's make that a thing. Um, let's make that totally a thing, where somebody says that they are black and they are a woman to get, uh, to get those grants.
Shaun: Now this seems obvious to say, but all this proves that Keen is not really concerned about men in women's spaces, given that that is exactly where she is advising men to go, and she especially isn't concerned about women's comfort, given that she's advising men to go into those spaces armed. What she is concerned about solely is trans people. She doesn't want to keep men out of women's spaces: She's telling men to go into women's spaces. What she wants is to keep trans women out of women's spaces, because this isn't really about women's safety or comfort for Keen. It's about enforcing what she considers normal.
Shaun: Keen always sidesteps the question of how any sort of trans bathroom bill would be enforced by saying she can always tell who is trans. She always knows: Which firstly isn't true, because multiple times reading her Twitter feed, I saw her accuse people of being trans who are not trans, but also it doesn't really matter, does it? It doesn't matter if Kellie-Jay Keen has a perfect, accurate trans-radar: She isn't stationed outside every toilet in the world, is she? How good she is at spotting trans people doesn't matter. There are plenty of stories about cis people being accosted in the bathroom by some nosy jerk who thinks they look like they don't belong.
Shaun: And Keen can't even say that she's relying on some inherent cis woman intuition here, because she's also encouraging men to go patrolling for trans people in women's spaces. There was a story just recently from a children's track and field event in Canada where a grandfather of one of the students stopped the event to accuse a nine-year-old cis girl of being trans, just because she had short hair. He demanded certification to prove the girl wasn't trans, and his wife called one of the girls parents a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile.
Shaun: Kellie-Jay Keen doesn't mind these sorts of false accusations being thrown at cis women and girls, and this is not my assumption, here. She has stated that she thinks most women wouldn't mind being challenged like this, and that quote “false accusations are not as important as keeping men out.” Cis people who don't present in a traditionally masculine or feminine way being harassed in public is just one more thing Keen is willing to accept so long as it means trans people also get harassed, of course. So cis women with short hair who like wearing jeans and a shirt, it's genital inspections for you, I'm afraid, if Kellie-Jay Keen and her friends get their way.
Shaun: The last point I want to bring up here with regards to Keen's stated motivations for her activism is that of fertility, and what she claims are the potential effects of puberty blockers in particular.
Kellie-Jay Keen: There are children taking puberty blockers that will totally annihilate their sexual function and their fertility. Their parents are indoctrinated, their schools are indoctrinated their doctors are indoctrinated, the counselors are indoctrinated, and it needs somebody to speak up.
Shaun: So Keen claims to be motivated by a need to protect the fertility of trans youths. However, I'd like to have a think about this in relation to a quote of Keen’s that I've shown previously, where she claims that quote “women who call themselves men should be sterilized.”
Shaun: Now I showed this in a previous video as a throwaway look-how-horrible-this-person-is sort of thing, but there's more to be said about this statement, so let's consider it for a minute. Firstly, I'd like to note that Keen says they should be sterilized: It isn't get sterilized. This is something that is happening to them. Next, Keen, of course, got a lot of pushback for this tweet, some from people inside her own camp, who realized it looks very bad for one of theirs to be openly advocating for forced sterilizations. And she got pretty angry about this, bemoaning that apparently it's controversial to think that certain people she doesn't like should be sterilized.
Shaun: Apparently it's controversial - you can't say anything nowadays, can you? You can't even advocate for the forced sterilization of minorities without the woke snowflake brigade getting all upset: It's political correctness gone mad! Another thing to note here is that Keen didn't later apologize for this remark and retract it: In fact, she doubled down on it. And when she was later asked if she retracts it, she says no, she doesn't think they should have children. Her only attempted defense is to say that she did not propose a sterilization plan. So she said it should happen, but she didn't personally draw up a timetable for it, so that's okay.
Shaun: So let's try to work this whole thing out, here. Kellie-Jay Keen says she's very worried about people who she calls women medically transitioning, claiming that the process will render them sterile. However she also thinks that they should actually just be sterilized, as they're not fit to be parents, according to her. Now I have to admit I chased my tail on this one for a while. One minute, she refers to trans men as poor little victims who need to be protected from damaging their own bodies, and the next minute she refers to them as dangerous abusers who need to be sterilized to prevent them from reproducing. On the surface, it doesn't make sense, does it? I went back and forth on this, trying to understand how one person could believe what seem to be too directly contradictory things, but I finally understood it when my girlfriend pointed out that Keen is operating on zombie rules.
Shaun: From her perspective, everyone starts out as a potential victim, but the moment they are actually victimized - as she sees it - they become infected and cease to be human. The key to understanding this contradiction turned out to be dehumanization.
Shaun: In relation to that, I'd like to talk about this Twitter conversation from 2016 between Keen, Magdalen Berns, and Charlie Peters, who is a GB news presenter. The context is some fluff nothing tweet about how supposedly woke and politically correct universities are. Keen takes the opportunity to be transphobic, of course, to which someone replies that the situation seems like a Sci-Fi story. Magdalen Berns replies “Horror film,” to which Charlie Peters says he can't wait to bash some heads in. The like on this tweet is from Magdalen Berns, by the way. Keen then replies “That will really put an end to safe spaces, wink,” to which Berns says, “Don't hold your breath. It’s a long old fight, and we are dealing with a pack of sociopathic wolves.“
Shaun: This comment from Berns here is really something special, you know: “Our enemies, who we're currently describing as movie monsters and fantasizing about bashing their heads in, and who I even dehumanize in this very tweet; they sure are sociopaths, aren't they?”
Shaun: So to sum up everything about Keen's motivations for her single issue activism we've seen so far, she claims to want to keep men out of women's spaces but also encourages men to go into those spaces. She claims to want to protect women's rights but is willing to give up their abortion rights. She claims to be concerned about child grooming, but not when the accused is a personal friend or politician that she likes. She claims to be concerned about health and fertility, but also supports sterilizing people she doesn't like. All of Kellie-Jay Keen's claimed motivations for her anti-trans campaign turn out on investigation to be groundless. She doesn't really believe any of these things, or her actions would, by necessity, be different than they are.
Shaun: So what's the conclusion here? Well, if she isn't really motivated by protecting children and defending women's rights, what is actually motivating Kellie-Jay Keen? So Keen has been around on the internet for quite a long time. Her Twitter account goes back more than ten years. She was a regular poster on Mumsnet back in the day, until she was banned for refusing to stop misgendering people, which I was very surprised to hear was a rule Mumsnet enforces, by the way. And she had a previous YouTube channel where she would post political commentary videos she filmed while driving her children to and from school, which seems like an incredibly bad idea in terms of both internet safety and road safety.
Shaun: Now I'm going to give my impression of Keen based on her earlier internet presence here, before it became dominated by her single issue activism. Now I'll keep this bit short. I don't want to get too personal, but I do think it is important for understanding some things I'm going to say later. So okay: my impression of Keen, looking at her earlier internet presence is that she's someone who feels very strongly that it's important she be seen as standing up for her principles, but she also gives the impression that she hasn't spent any time at all actually thinking about why she holds the principles that she does.
Shaun: She gets her principles by way of what she’d call common sense gut instinct: things she reckons she just knows because they're so obvious. She attributes far too many things to evolutionary psychology and genetic memory, rationalizing her own thoughts as being naturally and automatically correct by virtue of being in her head. I mean, they must be in there for some reason, right? Keen doesn't read and is suspicious of anyone who comes across as two learned or academic, and she will dismiss studies out of hand unless they agree with her preconceived notions about the world. I’ve also watched her comment on a lot of debates and speeches, and she always takes an instant dislike to anyone who seems to be thinking about what they're saying, and conversely she praises people who speak authoritatively, even if what they're saying is absolute nonsense.
Shaun: She takes a very individualistic view of complex systemic issues. I’ve seen her holding individual Muslims to account for every wrong ever committed in the name of Islam, holding individual sex workers to account for all of sex trafficking, and so on. Of course recently this has become holding individual people to account for everything wrong any trans person has ever done, or that she imagines that they might have done.
Shaun: Keen also has something of a conspiracist streak: one that got a lot worse over the Covid lockdown. When reality doesn't line up with things Keen believes she knows are true, she usually explains this with references to something shady going on behind the scenes; unseen puppet masters pulling the strings of society, and the like, but we'll get more into that a little later.
Shaun: Overall, Keen favors authoritarian action and speech. She has a narrow view of how she thinks humans should behave, rooted in biased ideas about normality and naturality, and she has an incredible incuriosity about and lack of empathy for anyone who thinks differently from her. Now you might be thinking, “Okay Sean, you've taken a lot of words there just to say Kellie-Jay Keen is a conservative,” which yes, that is what she is, although she herself was reluctant to accept the title for a long time. Back in the day, Keen still considered herself a feminist and something interesting to note here is that she wasn't always actively transphobic. And in fact she actually used to show confusion and annoyance at transphobia, viewing it as an unnecessary division within feminism.
Shaun: In light of posts like this one, I’ve seen some people suggest that Keen's anti-trans campaign is a pure grift. You know, she wasn't actually transphobic herself but she recognized a market she could sell cheap tat to. And sell cheap tat she does: Having been banned from various fundraising websites, Keen spends a large portion of each of her livestreams advertising the various tacky products in her online shop, like she's hosting some sort of transphobe shopping network, but I think the pure grift narrative is a bit overly simplistic and can work to obscure the way that radicalization works.
Shaun: It's possible that Keen wasn't a transphobic bigot, but then was radicalized into being a very fervent one, and just along the way worked out how to earn a lot of money selling overpriced stickers and the likes to other bigots, and this is what I believe happened. The money is definitely a factor: For sure, the campaign is her day job by now, but it isn't the main motivation for Keen's anti-trans campaign. The main motivation there is simply hatred. Kellie-Jay Keen hates trans people.
Shaun: Now this next section of my video is going to be me providing evidence for the claim that Keen is motivated by hatred, and I know we've seen a fair bit of that already, but I'd ask that you pay particular attention to the content warnings in the description of this video, because some of this stuff is just really nasty. So I was first motivated to make this video when I saw this screenshot of a Facebook post. In it, someone sends a Daily Mail article to Keen, then going by her other name, Posie Parker. The article is about the possible adverse health effects of estrogen patches for menopausal women, and the poster includes the comment, “I wonder what the effect on men is?” to which the Posie Parker account replies “Hopefully death,” with a little shrugging emoji, there.
Shaun: Now I knew that Keen was a dreadful person before seeing this, but I had a hard time believing she'd openly been this dreadful. Thinking that this post could be fake, I went looking to see if I could confirm its validity, and in the process, I dug up another Facebook post where Keen comments on a different Daily Mail article about the possibility of womb transplants for transgender women where she says, “I hope the male body is fatally allergic to fertilized embryos and nothing less.” Now I didn't understand this at the time: I was pretty naive. It seemed far too extreme for someone who is rapidly becoming the face of the anti-trans rights movement; someone who is interviewed on TV about it, someone who's supported by JK Rowling and the likes, to have a history of outright saying that she hopes trans people die.
Shaun: Surely we all would have heard of that, right, if she was going around wishing death on people? So were these posts fake? Photoshops made up by internet trolls, or what? Well, as it turns out:
Kellie-Jay Keen: Um, I think one of the things I did recently is that I posted that I hope men who, uh, have uterus implants or try - try and have uterus implants - uh, had a fatal consequence. Now that's because I think it's deeply unethical and hateful to implant a uterus into a man.
Shaun: That's Keen talking about being banned from Facebook for one of these posts in a video titled “Banned from Social Media,” there, so that's that confirmed. Anyway, Kellie-Jay Keen wants trans people to die. She said it openly and never retracted it or apologized for it. And she actually makes a point of never apologizing for anything she ever says, so I imagine she'd repeat this today if she was asked to apologize for it. And I'd just like to point out that when Keen is talking about her Facebook ban she's sitting in front of her “Adult Human Female” flag. That's just something to remember for later. Anyway, let's watch another horrible clip.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Um, Eric Wade, fifty dollars, thank you very much indeed. Um, nail the perp’s John Thomas to a tree stump, pour gas in it, light it on fire, hand “her” a butter knife and tell her to cut - cut or burn. That’s - I mean, sinister but, but I like the imagery.
Shaun: What can I say? That was Keen reading a Super Chat donation message she got from a member of her stream chat talking about torturing a trans woman, there. Now it should be noted here that while the message calls the trans woman in question a “perp,” the reason they were talking about that particular trans woman was because she'd reported someone to the police for online harassment. That's all: The trans woman in question didn't do anything illegal or violent towards the person she reported to the police. She just reported them, and for that Keen and her chat have a big old laugh about the imagery of torturing and burning her.
Shaun: Next up, I want to talk about this tweet from late 2016. So a Twitter poster brought up the 2011 beating of trans woman Chrissy Lee Polis. Polis was attacked by two teenagers after saying she was going to use a McDonald's restroom, and was beaten until she had a seizure. The attack was filmed by one of the McDonald's employees. Don't go and watch it, it's horrible. This attack was classified as a hate crime according to a 2011 Baltimore Sun article. Assistant State’s Attorney Rachel Cogen provided details of the beating in court. The teenagers who carried out the attack were eating at McDonald's and saw Polis go to the women's bathroom. They complained to workers that a man was using the women's bathroom, she said. And it should be noted that the older teenager, who was nineteen at the time, was charged with and pled guilty to a hate crime. So Polis was misgendered by her attackers prior to the attack, and we should remember that this all happened years before Keen was tweeting about it, so there's no excuse for her not knowing this.
Shaun: Anyway, Keen says neither the girls nor the boyfriend knew the trans woman wasn't female. “Not transphobic, possibly blind.” So Keen straight up lies about the facts of the case there, and also takes the opportunity to insult the appearance of the woman who was beaten so violently that she had a seizure. Keen also liked this tweet responding to hers, which claims the attackers didn't misgender the person who they attacked. But they did, of course. This is just blatant lying, here.
Shaun: Next up, I’d like to talk about the case from last year concerning a trans NHS worker who was subjected to a campaign of bullying and abuse at work. She was called slurs, found offensive notes in her locker, asked inappropriate questions by superiors and the likes, and she won the discrimination case. I want to make clear courts agree that this was a case of discrimination. Anyway, here's Keen talking about the case on her stream.
Kellie-Jay Keen: He also found an offensive note in her locker and overheard colleagues probably going, “Oh my God, that pervert's in the changing room again.” (Reading) “Abuse came after staff were told he would be using the female changing rooms.” Yes, good! Of course it should. I wonder if women can claim discrimination now - those women in Sheffield.
Shaun: So Keen thinks discrimination against trans people is okay, and I'd just like to back up that claim with another clip.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I don't care what you think about this, but if you are in a public-facing role, um, trusted by the state. If you have any position of authority or trust, then I'm sorry but you can't be a man who calls himself a woman. You just - it's just a big fat no for me. Anybody with that sort of power, it's a big fat no. Apparently these people are vulnerable - I don't go along with that, but even if I did, that would be a good enough reason to keep them, uh, out of any position of authority. So I’m, you know, I'm happy - I’m happy to say that in some situations, um, being exclusive or discriminatory is absolutely one hundred percent fine by me.
Shaun: So that's Keen saying trans people shouldn't be able to work in positions of authority there. Anyway, next up I'd like to talk about Lucy Meadows, who was a transgender teacher who died by suicide in 2013 after being subjected to a campaign of harassment by the UK press. Here's Keen talking about that case.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Way back there was a teacher who pretended to be female, and they were outed in the Press. Pretty sure everyone who'd ever met them knew that they weren’t a female, and I think they took their own lives. I think people were really upset that a man pretended to be a woman and taught their primary school kids, and I'm just gonna say quite right, too.
Shaun: Now if that clip sounded shockingly callous to you, trust me it is par for the course for how Keen talks about suicide. She laughs on Twitter about people who attempt suicide, dismisses worries about the trans-suicide rate by saying it isn't so high, and mocks suicide attempts and people struggling with suicidal ideation by saying “How hard is suicide?”
Shaun: Keen calls suicide a cross between inability to deal with stuff and a tantrum.She has no sympathy at all for people who die by suicide. She thinks they're simply weak fools who can't deal with reality, and she especially doesn't care about trans people who die by suicide, but that's hardly surprising, as I'd ask you to remember that we're talking about someone who stated several times that she wants trans people to die.
Shaun: I also have to mention one particularly slimy argument that Keen uses to sidestep the suicide issue, and it's one that, reading her feed, I saw her say over and over again. So someone will say something like the oppression of trans people leads to an increased risk of suicide, or, indeed, that acceptance of trans people leads to a decreased risk of suicide, and then Keen will respond men 45-59 are the most likely group to commit suicide. Which is not a response, is it? Because the argument was never about discerning which group of people is the absolute most likely to die by suicide. It was about suicide rates, the likelihood of certain people dying by suicide, and what we can do to reduce that. Keen's standard response here is just a cowardly dodge, pretending that she's heard a different argument, and responding to that instead of what the person actually said.
Shaun: I'd like to talk for a minute about the sort of language Keen uses when she's arguing with people. How quick she is to use very personal insults and the sorts of things she feels it's appropriate to insult. For instance, Keen likes to attack men by speculating about them being short or having small penises, or she frequently uses low income as an insult. She has a real disdain for both poor people and overweight people. You can see why JK Rowling likes her. “Go fuck yourself poor white trash pig ugly fatty,” is a good example sample of the sorts of places she usually goes to when she feels she's losing an argument. And if she can't find anything to attack about a cis woman's appearance, that won't stop her insulting them: She'll simply dismiss them as being insecure, air-headed Barbies.
Shaun: Every woman who disagrees with Keen, cis or trans, is either mocked and dismissed for failing to achieve a certain standard of feminine beauty or mocked and dismissed for achieving it too much. Women who disagree with her are, to Keen, either jealous and ugly or shallow bimbos. Trans women who do not reach that standard of traditional feminine beauty are mocked relentlessly by Keen in all sorts of gendered ways; their hair is bad, their makeup is bad, their clothes are bad. You know, never mind the feelings of any of her cis women followers who also do not meet those standards. But the moment Keen encounters trans women who do meet her beauty standards, she immediately starts dismissing the importance of the standards that she was just using to judge people. She swaps back into her faux feminist mode. “Oh, so you're reducing womanhood to hair and makeup and pretty clothes,” she'll say, as though she herself wasn't just doing that very thing in order to mock people.
Shaun: Keen also spends a lot of time quizzing people on if they're trans, quizzing people on what genitals they have, quizzing people on what genitals they're attracted to. Like a creepy pervert would.
Shaun: I should point out I've never seen someone quite so obsessed with other people's genitals.
Shaun: Now I could go on listing the terrible things Kellie-Jay Keen says on social media, but if I covered all of it, this video would be a week long. So that was just a representative sample, there. I do have to mention one more especially pathetic thing Keen does on Twitter, though. If she's arguing with a trans person, she will sometimes click through to that person's media tab and scroll back - sometimes for a very long time - until she finds a selfie of them to insult. Here she is mocking a trans person who was a teenager at the time, I believe, and if you note the dates, you'll see that she had to scroll back weeks to find a picture to insult. It's very strange, depressing, bleak behavior from an adult approaching fifty.
Shaun: So moving on, I'd like to ask a question: What would Kellie-Jay Keen actually do to trans people were she just in charge of society? So let's do that horrible thought experiment, here. So Prime Minister Keen comes to power. Can we work out from the things she has said the sorts of things that she would do?
Shaun: So let's start off by asking who would actually be allowed to transition in Kellie-Jay Keen's world. Well, nobody she considers too young, of course, but how young is too young for Keen? Nobody under the age of sixteen, maybe? Nobody under the age of eighteen? Well actually:
Kellie-Jay Keen: We will not ever say that transition is a choice that anyone under twenty-five can make. I think they should never make it.
Shaun: So twenty-five is the age of majority for transition for Keen; a full seven years after most countries consider someone to be a legal adult. And it should be noted here that Keen also thinks any parent who transitions is committing child abuse, so you have to be over the age of twenty-five, but with no kids.
Shaun: Now she obviously does not support any public money being spent on trans healthcare, so any people who are too poor are therefore excluded from medical transition. So if you want to transition, you better have a pretty good job. Except, as we've already seen, Keen also supports discriminating against trans people in order to keep them out of certain jobs. Obviously she thinks trans people shouldn't be able to be teachers, but she'd also ban them more generally from any role that is quote “public facing” or any “position of authority.” Which a very nebulous classification, there. What counts as a position of authority?
Shaun: You can see that Keen always has some reason or other for why any particular trans person should not transition. But what about someone who meets all of her criteria? What if we imagine an independently wealthy, unmarried, unemployed trans person who never interacts with the public or has any authority? What about them?
Kellie-Jay Keen: So…will we go back? Like somebody said to me- so I was having a discussion today, and someone said “What did you - “ you know, “Will it - what - what will happen? How will it end? When will we know that we've won?” and I don't think it’s- Just when the government basically stopped - has stopped transitioning children - although that is no small victory, that is that's a massive thing- if we stop the transitioning of children. I think we would also have to stop the transitioning of adults. We give these people the most compassion. Um, you know, same as everybody else going through a mental health crisis, and we manage to give them enough talking therapies that it means that they no longer feel that they have to transition; that surgery is not an option, that hormones that mess up their, um, endocrine system is not an option.
Shaun: So the goal for Keen - when she'll know that she's won - will be when everyone, adults included, are prevented from transitioning. Keen's catchphrase is “I never lose,” something she says in a particularly obnoxious way at the end of every video and speech that she makes, and this is what she means by that. Winning, to Kellie-Jay Keen, means no more trans people.
Shaun: Now to be somewhat fair to Keen, she goes on to say that she wants to do this first by giving trans people therapy - you know, conversion therapy - rather than just arresting all trans people on the spot, or whatever. But this raises a question, doesn't it? What happens when her conversion therapy approach doesn't work? For Keen, all trans people are just mad: They just have some sort of mental disorder, so you send them off to therapy and they get cured, and no longer want to be trans. Simple.
Shaun: Keen assumes, or pretends to assume, that this conversion therapy will just always obviously work exactly as she expects it to, but of course it wouldn’t. So what happens when trans people go through her conversion therapy process and say, “No, I'm still trans. Nothing you can say will change my mind. I'm gonna keep on living my life as I see fit?” Would Prime Minister Keen say, “Oh sorry, it looks like I was wrong. All my beliefs about trans people were based on lies. I realize now the error of my ways?”
Shaun: Of course she wouldn’t. This would be when the throwing people in prison starts, you know, after the performative attempt at doing things the air quotes “nice way.” And I really don't think conversion therapy is nice. I want to make clear it's what I think Keen considers to be the nice way of erasing trans people, which is her ultimate political goal. Keen wants all trans people either in the closet or in prison or de-transitioned or dead, but really just vanished from society at large, being the main point. Keen is absolutely an eliminationist when it comes to trans people. Her victory condition is no more trans people.
Shaun: And I'd like to talk about a couple of effects this sort of obsessive hate can have. The first is how, over time, it comes to supersede all previously held beliefs and principles. For example, on the issue of abortion Keen claims to be pro-choice, and as I stated earlier I think she genuinely believes that she is. And she probably doesn't like abortion being outlawed. She doesn't like abused minors being forced to carry unsafe pregnancies. She doesn't like women dying needlessly on operating tables. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't hate it. She doesn't hate it like she hates trans people. Her hatred is simply a stronger, more animating of a force than all of her previously held principles.
Shaun: This is how someone who was once proudly pro-choice ends up allying with anti-abortion activists, how someone who was once eager to call out the church’s covering up of child abuse scandals ends up allying with the religious right, and so on. The moment they get in the way of the hate campaign, all those previously held principles get thrown out the window.
Shaun: The next effect of holding all this hatred in your head I want to talk about is both interesting and pretty worrying. Imagine for a second that you are Kellie-Jay Keen. You oppose trans rights. You think that the fight against trans rights is the most important issue facing women today. You actually think it's the most important women's rights issue in the past century. You think there's no such thing as trans people; that everyone who claims to be trans is either lying or insane, and what's more, you think that everyone else already agrees with you. There's a silent majority out there who all share your position: They're just staying silent for some reason.
Shaun: So what could possibly explain the silence of the silent majority? What force could be controlling them? How is it possible for such a small minority of people, who you assume everyone else also hates, to have manipulated society to such a degree? If we take everything Kellie-Jay Keen believes to be true, then there's really only one explanation for this state of affairs: Conspiracy.
Kellie-Jay Keen: And then you can start speaking up, and if you start speaking up, you encourage someone else to speak up, and they encourage someone else to speak up, and then eventually everyone is speaking up. And the nasty, pernicious minority of people who are managing to control our politicians, our judiciary, our education system, our NHS; those people will be silenced. And those that went along with them, we will not forget who you are.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Our enemy is vast - is vast, and it's long slimy, slithery tentacles have reached right into central government through every - through, through our media.
Kellie-Jay Keen: It’s such a small minority of people, it's not like they've captured every single institution, and education system, and our judiciary, and our social media platforms. Everywhere we want to talk, everywhere we might want to visit, everywhere we might want to have private space, or a little bit of woman something. It’s not that that's happened
Kellie-Jay Keen: But I do think there is an elite - a set of people on this Earth that are deeply sinister and far too powerful.
Kellie-Jay Keen: And our fight is to get rid of these parasites throughout women's organizations. And they are absolutely everywhere. They are difficult to avoid. Um, they are enmeshed in nearly everything. They are writing our policies.
Kellie-Jay Keen: It is in your children's classrooms, it is in your hospitals, it is in your police force, it will tell you to use the wrong words for a man in a court of law. It is everywhere. This is not playtime. This is end-of-bloody-game time! This really is end of civilization, end of days, like game over.
Kellie-Jay Keen: I really do feel like it's the end of days, I really do feel we are in a very, very scary place.
Kellie-Jay Keen: We are under the most immense global attack, and it's happening to us in textbook fashion all over the world. You have to bury your differences and divisions. You have to do that. I- if you're the sort of person that freely calls people, uh, right wing white supremacists, if that's your bag, then you're not on the side of women. You have to clearly forget everything else -
Kellie-Jay Keen: (Reading donor message) Badgerwise: “Kudos for your strength and courage despite attacks from the crazed vindictive activists. Trans is part of a broader agenda by the Luciferian elite to invert the natural order - to call good, uh, evil and evil good.“ Thank you very much for your 19.99. No, I used to think all this stuff was really mad, and - and now I'm just at a point where I think I don't - I don't think anything but absolute madness makes sense.
Shaun: I'd apologize about the long compilation of clips there, but remember that I had to watch hundreds of hours of this rubbish, so that's just a little representative sample of the sort of conspiracy theory bile Keen is spouting night after night on her YouTube channel. These are the sorts of absurd narratives that Keen has to believe to explain the fact that there have been advancements in trans rights, when she knows - she just knows - that nobody really believes in or wants trans rights.
Shaun: So to square this circle, there's apparently a secretive elite group of people manipulating society whose slimy tentacles are controlling our governments and media. They've parasitically invaded and captured our institutions. They're coming for your kids. It's the end of days. And to fight back to silence this vile minority of people - pay attention to the fact that Keen stated she wants to silence her enemies, there - we have to stop bickering over silly divisive issues like white supremacy.
Shaun: So I have a few things to say about all this. Firstly, one of the questions I asked at the start of the video was why would neo-Nazi groups want to turn up to support Kellie-Jay Keen. And, well, I imagine you probably already noticed by yourself and don't need me to point this out, but anyway the neo-Nazis also believe in a secretive elite group of people manipulating society by controlling our governments and media. They believe that group of people is Jewish people.
Shaun: Neo-Nazi groups and transphobic groups like Keen’s have a very similar belief structure: they're organized around hatred of a capital “O” other; a minority of people who are claimed to be pulling the strings of society from behind the scenes. This group is demonized, dehumanized, likened to parasites and vermin, and there's a repeated narrative of some future glorious day when we - the normal people, the actual humans - rise up against our enemies, the parasites, and do away with them once and for all.
Shaun: The capital “O” otherness of both Jewish and trans people is described in a similar way by their respective hate groups: Both groups are presented as pretend people; imposters living among us, trying to weaken us, and both hate groups use things like facial features, skull shapes body proportions, and so on in order to identify those who belong to the group that they hate.
Shaun: When presenting the capital “O” others as shadowy behind the scenes manipulators, the neo-Nazis will, of course, focus on Jewishness as the primary evil, with trans issues and LGBT+ issues in general being presented as one of the many Jewish plots intended to weaken society. Transphobic groups like Keens tend to see transness itself as the primary evil, keeping all the same narratives of societal control and decline caused by secretive elite manipulators, but they simply swap out the word “Jewish” for the word “trans.”
Shaun: Now obviously, being so similar, these are not two wholly distinct narratives, or even two wholly distinct groups of people. In fact, sometimes it can be hard to tell which group you're watching.
Speaker: And I know about language, and I know that this is based on something we call “the big lie.” Do you know the big lie? The big lie was first described by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. The big lie is such a big lie that ordinary people like us think, “Well, that can't be a lie, because I'd never tell any bigger - as big a lie as that.”
Shaun: That was a speaker at a Let Women Speak event in Newcastle, there, quoting Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Now it should be noted here that when Hitler wrote about the concept of the big lie, he didn't say “We, the Nazis, are going to do the big lie to attack Jewish people.” He claimed that Jewish people were telling a big lie; in particular, he was claiming that Jewish people were lying about the reasons that Germany lost the first world war.
Shaun: By citing Adolf Hitler's use of the big lie theory - instead of, say, anyone else who isn't actually Adolf Hitler's use of the big lie theory - the speaker is, therefore, casting trans people as the Jewish people in her metaphor, and her herself and her allies as the Nazis.
Shaun: Which, well…she said it, not me.
Shaun: I’d like now to give you an example of the exact sort of way that transphobic narratives are informed by and associated with antisemitic narratives. And this is kind of a weird, twisty story, so you're gonna have to stick with me here for a little while.
Shaun: So when I was watching through Kellie-Jay Keen's YouTube archive, I noticed that she would make occasional references to an American friend she had; someone she called a mentor several times who would give her advice behind the scenes, but she always seemed a little cagey about revealing who it was. So I was like, “Okay, there's an American mentor friend who gives Keen advice, noted.” So I keep watching, and then in one stream Kellie-Jay gets a Super Chat message from someone called Brandon Showalter, and she responds:
Kellie-Jay Keen: And then, aaaaaah, Brandon! Brandon Showalter with his ten dollars, “Keep that prophesizing. Uncompromised language matters.” Um, this is my good friend Brandon who is a very lovely, um, religious Christian man, um, who always tells me that I'm that (laughs) I’m doing more of God's work than some Christians. So I take that as a great compliment. Take that as a great compliment.
Shaun: Now this stuck out to me, because she called Brandon Showalter a good friend, and I'd heard Keen talk several times about not really having any friends. Now I don't bring that up to make fun of her, it's just what she says, and it's why her calling someone a “good friend who's always telling her things” seemed noteworthy to me. So I thought “Well, that Brandon Showalter guy seems like a good candidate for her American mentor that she talks about. “ So then I forgot about all that and kept watching, and I eventually got to this video released earlier this year, which details Keen’s Let Women Speak tour in the United States.
Shaun: Just over an hour in, Keen is being driven to an event and she's filming in the car. She's sitting up front and the driver keeps making comments about things Keen was talking about, so I was like, “I wonder who that is.” You know, she isn't in a cab, clearly. Anyway, they get where they're going, and the guy starts giving a speech and introduces himself as Brandon Showalter. So I'm like, “Oh, that's him. That's the guy; Mr. Secret American Super Chat Man. It makes sense she'd spend time with him on her American tour, I suppose.” Anyway, let's hear what he says.
Brandon Showalter: I'm really grateful that everybody could be here tonight. My name is Brandon Showalter. I’m a journalist with the Christian Post, and I've been so since the summer of 2016, but it was in late 2016 and early 2017 where I learned about the experimental gender medicalization and, um, particularly what puberty blockers were. Through digging around for sources and finding out information, I learned about this brave woman in the UK.
Shaun: So Showalter is a journalist with The Christian Post, and he has all the opinions you'd expect of someone in that position. He’s anti-abortion and anti-LGBT in general, of course, but going through the site's archives of his stories, he seems very much to have become a primarily trans issues reporter. Clearly trying to use trans issues as a wedge to push back against gay rights and abortion rights and other things the U.S religious right doesn't like.
Shaun: Showalter has been writing stories about Kellie-Jay Keen for years now. For instance, when she was questioned by the police in 2018, he wrote an article about it; an article which quotes Kaeley Triller in support of Keen, actually. Triller says she thinks the police should really have better things to do, which is a very bold opinion for her in particular to be sharing.
Shaun: All alongside Kellie-Jay Keen's activist career, Showalter has been there offering encouragement and writing supportive articles. When Keen was banned from Facebook for saying she wanted trans people to die, for instance, Showalter wrote an article complaining about it; one which smartly neglects to mention the sorts of things that Keen was saying in order to get herself banned, since they're obviously indefensible. From how Showalter talks on Twitter and in this documentary, he strikes me as an organizer; someone who makes connections between people in the anti-trans movement. And in fact, a while back a bunch of anti-trans lobbyist emails got leaked, and one of the emails that was leaked came from Brandon Showalter, and sees him connecting someone with his quote “friend” Kara Dansky, who is the co-founder of the anti-trans group Women's Liberation Front.
Shaun: So Showalter makes introductions, he keeps an eye out for anti-trans stories to push, and - this is just my opinion - he seems rather proud of recognizing Keen's promise early and choosing her as someone to back and to promote. Now you might be saying, “Sean, the fact that Kellie-Jay Keen is friends with a conservative Christian anti-abortion journalist is mildly interesting, but you said this point was supposed to be about antisemitism,” and you're right. I am getting to it, trust me.
Shaun: So reading Brandon Showalter's articles, one name kept appearing again and again; Jennifer Bilek, who Showalter says has extensively researched the billions of dollars fueling the transgender movement across the globe. He often quotes Bilek’s articles, such as “The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement,” and “Who are the Rich White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?” In article after article about trans issues, Showalter finds a way to slip in a paragraph about the wealthy LGBT individuals supposedly funding the transgender movement, and he always cites Jennifer Bilek’s articles and blog posts as his source.
Shaun: The billionaires supposedly behind the LGBT movement are an integral part of how Showalter relays trans issues to his audience, and it's something he credits entirely to Jennifer Bilek’s research. And it's not just his articles: Showalter acts the same on Twitter, continuously promoting Bilek’s work. Asking people to interview her, he shares her research in TV interviews, he wrote a book called “Exposing the Gender Lie” which quotes Jennifer Bilek, she's a guest on his podcast, “Generation Indoctrination,” and from the way they interact with each other on Twitter, they seem like pretty close friends.
Shaun: Bilek returns Showalter's promotion of her work by often promoting and praising his, so this is very much a two-way street. Now the reason I'm going to lengths to make clear the connection between Showalter and Jennifer Bilek is because Jennifer Bilek doesn't just write about the billionaires behind the LGBT movement; she writes about the Jewish billionaires behind the LGBT movement.
Shaun: So let's go and read one of Jennifer Bilek's blog posts. Why not? So this one is titled “Transhumanism and Judaism,” and, I quote: “I’ve often wondered why so many of the men involved in the transgender transhumanist agenda are Jewish, and of course I've been accused more than once of promoting a Jewish conspiracy theory. I just report on who the men are. I don't single them out for being Jewish, and I've never really speculated about why so many are. Quite some time ago, I came across Keith Woods’ video on his theory of why this might be. I revisited this today because someone wrote and asked about the Jewish aspect of the men involved in this agenda, and I found it equally as fascinating as I did the first time. I wonder how others might feel about this.”
Shaun: Then Bilek links to a bitchute video titled “Transhuman Judaism” created by a man called Keith Woods. Now Keith Woods is an Irish antisemitic far-right nationalist. A random screenshot of his blog here shows him quoting from the writings of white supremacist Holocaust denier Eustace Mullins, which describes Jews as parasites. Posting anti-semitic memes, complaining about quote “Jew-run” media platforms banning people, so on and so forth.
Shaun: Now I'm gonna make an assumption, here. I’m gonna assume that everyone currently watching this video agrees with me on the basis of this evidence, calling Keith Woods a racist - anyone who doesn't agree with that characterization here can go away, as far as I'm concerned. If we can't agree that this guy is a racist, then we are never going to agree on anything. So farewell, go home, and rethink your life. So okay, everyone remaining agrees: Here we have some open, unashamed antisemitic hatred, and this is where Jennifer Bilek sent her audience who were looking to learn more about the Jewish people supposedly funding the LGBT movement.
Shaun: Her tactics are so transparent here that it's genuinely quite embarrassing. You know, she's saying “Boy, there sure are a lot of Jews behind all this transgender stuff. Now I don't think that's bad, necessarily, I just find it interesting. I’ve just often wondered about it. If you find it interesting too, you should go and learn more about the Jews from this fascinating video made by a neo-Nazi.”
Shaun: It's interesting seeing how the same narrative passes through different hands, here. We start with Keith Woods saying that Jewish people are funding and promoting transgenderism and that's bad, then Jennifer Bilek links to that and says Jewish people are funding and promoting transgenderism and that's interesting. Bilek acts like a money launderer for ideas, here: She takes the fascist narratives and smooths off the rougher edges. She swaps out the open hatred for faux neutral interest, and then passes it on to the likes of Showalter and Keen, who dutifully share what is only one step removed from actual antisemitic fascist propaganda. And I say Keen there, as well, because like Showalter, Keen also shares Bilek’s work in her videos and on Twitter.
Shaun: And now after everything we've seen, when Bilek defends Keen against accusations of being a Nazi by claiming that our media is controlled, well we know what she means by that, don't we?
Shaun: Back at the start of the video, I mentioned an article that praises Keen that was written by Helen Joyce, author of the book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.” Joyce is the person who is now infamous for comments about reducing the number of trans people - even happily transitioned trans people - because she thinks they are, as she states, “a problem to a sane world.” Helen Joyce, like Kellie-Jay Keen, is an eliminationist: Their ultimate goal is not to protect women's rights or spaces or whatever; it's to get rid of trans people.
Shaun: Now I mention her here because her book repeats the same narrative of the billionaire backers of the LGBT movement. She talks about the billionaires who have quote “shaped the global agenda by funding briefing documents, campaign groups, research, and legal actions.” As an aside here, on the subject of funding legal actions, we have seen one billionaire offering to fund an activist's legal actions today, haven't we?
Shaun: Anyway, Joyce lists several billionaires who have donated to trans-inclusive human rights organizations, including naming George Soros as someone who has supposedly given millions of dollars to the Human Rights Campaign, an American LGBTQ advocacy group.
Shaun: He didn’t, though. This is just an error in the book, here. It's not true also, that multi-million dollar donation to the ACLU, there - that was for work towards ending mass incarceration, not for funding quote “trans activism.” Now if we want to find out where Helen Joyce got her bad information from, we could start by checking the citations in her book. We could do that if there were any, but there aren’t. But I think I know where all this may have come from.
Shaun: ”Your interview of me in 2020 for this book proved fruitful, I see. A citation was called for, for the work you lifted from me. My followers are messaging me about this. I think other American feminists got a raw deal as well, but I won't speak for them.” Hashtag #plagiarism. Jennifer Bilek there, accusing Helen Joyce on Twitter of stealing her work and using material provided by Bilek in a 2020 interview without citation.
Shaun: I don't know why she wants to be cited for such shoddy work, but whatever. Joyce, in response, claimed that she never got any new or useful information from talking to Bilek, and she also deleted all of her tweets mentioning Bilek, or where she'd promoted Bilek's work to her followers. Like this one where she promotes Bilek’s work, specifically in the context of talking about her book. Joyce didn't go back and remove her likes on Bilek’s tweeted links to her blog posts, though. Like this one, which contains this absurd graphic which lists some of the funders of the supposed “trans agenda,” and also make sure to point out which of the funders are gay, for some reason.
Shaun: I think it's pretty clear that Joyce did like and support Bilek’s work until Bilek went too openly bigoted about Jewish people, at which point Joyce was forced to cut ties and pretend none of the information in her book actually came from interviewing Bilek or reading her blog.
Shaun: Anyway, this is just one example of the ways in which anti-semitic narratives get into the gender critical mainstream, and I really hope this goes some way to explaining why fascist groups keep turning up to anti-trans events. Far-right groups recognize their own language and narratives. They know what someone means when they hear them talking about the “elite minority” controlling the government and media with their slimy tentacles. The far rights hear all of that and they identify with it. But there's another reason that the neo-Nazis would like transphobia and anti-LGBT language in general that goes beyond the rhetorical and structural similarities between the anti-trans movement and theirs, and that's the actual historical persecution of LGBT people by the Nazi party.
Shaun: If we're going to talk about that, though, we're first gonna have to tackle a particular bad argument that comes up time and again when making comparisons between hate groups that are around today and the Nazis. And we'll let Kellie-Jay Keen provide that bad argument for us. Why not? So someone calls her a Nazi, and she says -
Kellie-Jay Keen: Well. Well, that obviously makes you a Nazi, because that is definitely akin to the mass genocide of, uh, six million Jews and other minority groups in Germany in the - late 1930s - 40s. That's exactly the same. Standing up for women's rights is exactly the same as being a Nazi now.
Shaun: So that's how the argument goes: “How dare you make a comparison to the Nazis, when they started a world war and killed millions of people. I haven't done anything that bad, of course, so no comparison to the Nazis could possibly be valid.”
Shaun: Now the problem here is that Keen is describing the Nazis at the height of their power, but of course the Nazis weren't always at the height of their power, were they? They didn't pop into existence already in control of Germany and ready to start invading Europe. Before they could start a world war and kill millions of people, they had to get into power, and before they were in power, they had to establish themselves and reach a position where that was possible. And before they were there, the Nazis were a relatively small movement of hateful bigots. They had to start somewhere.
Shaun: Early Nazi meetings often had very few attendees, and even Adolf Hitler's first political speech was delivered in a beer hall to only around a hundred people. Lots of perfectly solid comparisons to the early Nazi party are dismissed because of the evils the Nazis committed later on when they were in power. World War II and the Holocaust are such immense crimes that they can obscure the path the early Nazis took to get themselves into a position where those crimes could be committed. Lots of small groups of bigots around today really are like the Nazis were, even if they're obviously much closer to the Nazis when they were starting out, rather than the Nazis when they invaded Poland.
Shaun: Also the Nazis, just like today's bigots, knew how to be veiled, how to lie, how to achieve their aims in indirect ways to avoid provoking a backlash. There were even times they toned down their antisemitism for political and economic gain, such as before the 1936 Olympics to prevent an international boycott. Even their laws targeting Jewish people could avoid mentioning Jewish people directly, such as their 1933 law designed to keep Jewish people out of German schools and universities. This was the law against overcrowding in German schools, which ordered limitations on the number of quote “non-Aryans” at German educational institutions, using the excuse of preventing overcrowding of schools. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this law was initially titled “Law against the Foreign Infiltration of German Universities” until quote “Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick had observed that the law might draw too much international attention to the intended exceptional treatment of Jews,” hence concerns about overcrowding being used as an excuse.
Shaun: The point I want to make here is that, regardless of how open or veiled they were being about their ultimate goals, regardless of how many of them they were at any one time, regardless of if they were just starting out or at the height of their power, the Nazis were always the Nazis. They didn't become the Nazis at some later time, they were the Nazis right from the start. The later Nazis couldn't have gotten to where they were and committed all of their terrible crimes without the work put in by the early Nazis, and a lot of modern comparisons to the early Nazis in particular are perfectly valid.
Shaun: If you're part of a movement organized around opposition to the rights of a particular minority group that you demonize and want to eradicate, then yes, you really are being like the Nazis even if you haven't personally started a World War.
Shaun: Anyway, with that said, I want to talk briefly about Magnus Hirschfeld. So Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist - which is a wonderful word - who was the head of the Institute for Sex Research, which operated in Berlin from 1919 to 1933. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and an outspoken advocate for the rights of sexual minorities. In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which operated with the aim of repealing paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that criminalized homosexuality. This has been called the first LGBT rights organization in history.
Shaun: Hirschfeld's Institute has an important place in transgender history for a few reasons. For one, it carried out early forms of what we now call gender affirming medical care; hair removal, facial feminization and masculinization surgeries, genital surgery, hormone therapy, supportive psychiatric therapy. If all this sounds surprisingly ahead of its time, that's only because in 1933, soon after the Nazis came to power, the Nazis destroyed the Institute and burned all of its research.
Shaun: Some of the most famous images of Nazi book burnings showed the Nazis burning the contents of the Institute for Sex Research. Magnus Hirschfeld himself was a frequent target of attacks from the Nazi press prior to them being in power. He was attacked on the front page of the Nazi party newspaper, “The Völkisch Observer.” Caricatures of him appeared on the front page of the newspaper, “Der Stürmer” - “The Stormer” - and also in “Der Angriff” - “The Attack,” a newspaper set up by Joseph Goebbels, who was the chief propagandist of the Nazi party.
Shaun: The Völkisch story uses the occasion of Magnus Hirschfeld delivering a presentation in a high school to complain about homosexuals lecturing in schools, calling it the destruction of the youth, and asks “German mothers, working women, do you want to surrender your children to homosexuals?” The article equates homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children, it uses homosexuality as an example of a supposed Jewish Marxist plot to undermine and weaken German society, and declares that the Nazi party are merely defending themselves against outside attempts to manipulate and poison the German populace. It uses Think Of The Children™ rhetoric in an attempt to appeal to women in particular, saying “Look, those weak intellectual Social Democrat types are letting the gays into your schools to preach to your children. Come and join the Nazi party. We know how to keep your children safe.”
Shaun: The piece in “Der Stürmer” is much the same, calling Hirschfeld “The Apostle of Sodomy” and claiming that he's carrying out a Jewish plot to promote immorality, to poison the youth, undermine society, and all that. This was, again, using the occasion of Hirschfeld giving a talk to students in a school. The Nazi press really liked pushing the “They’re coming for your kids” angle, apparently.
Shaun: Now after everything we've seen today, do I even really have to make explicit the comparison between how the early Nazi party talked about LGBT people and how today's bigots talk about LGBT people? It's all the exact same tactics and narratives, delivered in the same way, with the same aims: LGBT people are demonized and dehumanized, assumed to be criminals and dangerous to children, and their actions are presented as being orchestrated from behind the scenes by a secretive elite of evil manipulators. This was hateful conspiracy theory nonsense a hundred years ago, and its hateful conspiracy theory nonsense today, too.
Shaun: Both of these news articles end with a reference to some future time where the enemies of the Nazi party are going to get what's coming to them, where they'll be made to pay for what they've apparently done. The “Stürmer” article talks about a big cleaning out: The day when all their enemies will be cleared out of Germany, like one would clear out an animal stable, and with the benefit of hindsight, we know exactly what they meant by this, of course. And we should also know exactly what Kellie-Jay Keen means when she talks about silencing the parasitic minority who are controlling our society with their long slithery tentacles.
Shaun: Keen recently announced the launch of her own political party with the quote “After the rainbows, we are bringing a storm,” something she's quite fond of saying. She really likes that storm imagery.
Kellie-Jay Keen: But I just wanted to let you know that we are that close from a proper launch. As soon as we do, we are ready to go immediately. So our party is ready, our website is ready, we're just waiting for the, uh, yes. (Long dramatic pause, smile relishing the thought) And then - oh my God! - after Pride, we will bring the fucking storm.
Kellie-Jay Keen: Yeah, we’re not just taking back the public square. We’re going to take parliament, we’re gonna take councils (Note: English local government,) we’re gonna take police forces, we’re gonna take school governor boards.
Shaun: On the occasion of Kellie-Jay Keen announcing the launch of her political party, I'd like to confess to being rather irritated that a large part of the mainstream conversation in the press about the pushback against trans rights is now years out of date. As one example, JK Rowling previously claimed that she supported trans people; she just had a few concerns about how trans rights might clash with women's rights.
Shaun: But this is not at all where she is today. Today she's supporting someone who openly wants trans people removed from public life, someone who openly says that her goal is to prevent all transitions entirely, someone who gets banned from social media for saying she hopes trans people die. Kellie-Jay Keen is preaching genocide and JK Rowling is fully supporting her, but most mainstream coverage of this issue is still in the “just a few concerns” era. “Aren't those internet trolls horrible for criticizing poor JK Rowling, someone who just has a few concerns?” I tell them they need to catch up, but they're lagging behind on purpose, of course. They want the conversation to be out of date because it's much easier to defend the JK Rowling of a few years ago than to defend what she's doing today.
Shaun: As the mainstream conversation stands still, the anti-trans movement as a whole has become increasingly radical. JK Rowling's support for Kellie-Jay Keen is one of the reasons the other transphobes with a history of criticizing Keen are now accepting and defending her. Because standing against Keen now means standing against Rowling, and not many of them want to do that. And regardless of which strategies they might think would be more effective, I think it's important to remember that they all have the same aim in the long run, which is the restriction of trans rights. I’m sure a lot of the other prominent transphobes really don't like feeling like they have to stand alongside Kellie-Jay Keen and her fascist friends, but whether they like it or not is ultimately immaterial, isn't it? Because apparently they will do it. They might not like it, but they don't hate it.
Shaun: Clearly, their half-hearted attempt to keep Keen out of their movement completely failed, and, well if you can't beat them join them seems to be the philosophy over in the anti-trans camp. In a just world, their promotion of Kellie-Jay Keen and her eliminationist rhetoric would forever destroy the reputations of Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, JK Rowling and everyone else who's enabled and aided her movement. They're using feminism as a shield to defend an avowed anti-feminist just because they happen to share a hatred of trans people.
Shaun: And they can back Keen largely without fear right now, because they operate in a media environment which is incredibly hostile to trans people, and will go to enormous lengths to not ask any awkward questions. Can you even imagine a journalist laying all this out to Rowling? You know, “Why do you support someone who writes that she wants trans people to to be sterilized, JK Rowling?”
Shaun: I can't imagine that. I'll very happily believe it when I see it, though.
Shaun: In wrapping up today, I’d like to first point you to a few relevant videos made by LGBT people that I enjoyed and learned from during the making of this video. So Contrapoints made a video titled “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling,” which made some excellent comparisons to previous civil rights fights. The channel JohntheDuncan's video “Transphobia: The Far Right and Liberalism” is a great explainer for, among other things, how transphobia is being used to unite different far-right groups. Mia Mulder's recent video “What Is The Deal With The ‘Trans Debate?’” ends with some very good - in my cis opinion, anyway - advice for trans people about what they can do about being the subject of the air quote “trans debate.”
Shaun: And I'll myself give some advice to cis people, here. One thing I noticed when researching those Nazi newspapers is that, while building a case against a minority group, the Nazis would refer to real events - actual crimes they say were committed by individual Jewish people or individual gay people, or whoever. Now whether these were actually real crimes committed in the way the Nazi press says they were is, obviously, not trustworthy here. I mean, I'm not going to take the Nazis at their word, clearly. But the important thing is that they were claiming to have reasons for their beliefs. Hate groups do not say “We hate this minority group for no reason. We're just irrationally hateful, I guess. Now do you agree with us, or not?” That sort of thing would be easy to spot and stand against, right?
Shaun: And it's easy now, looking back, to say you obviously would not have fallen for Nazi lies about Jewish people, but I think it's a worthwhile exercise to consider seriously if you actually might have. If a Nazi article rattled off crimes they say were committed by Jewish people and then used that to paint all Jewish people as inherently criminal, would you have understood why that was wrong, and not went along with it? And even if it didn't sway you to being openly hateful yourself, might that have made you take an ambivalent centrist stance? Say, something like “Maybe there's two sides to this issue. Maybe they do have a point, even if they go a bit far.”
Shaun: And it's not just one article, remember? It's a sustained propaganda campaign. Can you really be sure that you wouldn't be affected by that? People who assume propaganda will never work on them are always the most susceptible to being influenced by it, because they don't think there's a need to be vigilant against it.
Shaun: We live right now in a time of intense anti-trans propaganda, because there is no silent majority just waiting to speak up, like Kellie-Jay Keen thinks there is. That majority needs to be built over time with a sustained propaganda campaign. And if you're ambivalent on this issue, you would have been ambivalent about all those historical civil rights fights that you'd like to think you'd have been on the right side of.
Shaun: I’m not saying you would have been openly hateful, even, but if you fall for arguments about dangerous trans people in women spaces you would have fallen for arguments about dangerous black men coming into white spaces to abuse white women, or dangerous gay men in schools, or so on. Some bigot would have pointed to a minority of criminal black people or gay people or Jewish people and said, “See, they're all like that. We should judge them all by the actions of this criminal minority.”
Shaun: And if you understand why that's wrong to say about black people, or gay people, or Jewish people, or any other minority, you should know it's wrong to say about trans people, too. So I'll say to any cis people watching this video, be vigilant about attempts to turn you against trans people. The “reasonable concerns” era is long over by now. We've got JK Rowling offering to bankroll the legal actions of an eliminationist anti-trans activist who's launching a political party: we've gone way beyond the “reasonable concerns” phase.
Shaun: If you ever see JK Rowling called transphobic online, one of her supporters always chimes in, asking the almost always bad faith question “What has JK Rowling ever done that's transphobic?” Well among other things, she's offered to bankroll the legal actions of an eliminationist anti-trans activist, she shares articles calling her a genius, she wears her merchandise. JK Rowling is all in on Kellie-Jay Keen.
Shaun: And on the subject of Kellie-Jay Keen's merch, whenever you see someone saying “I’m just asking ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘I’m just saying a woman is an adult human female. I’m just quoting a dictionary. What could be transphobic about that?’” Well, I've seen the person who came up with those slogans sitting in front of those slogans, wearing shirts with those slogans on them, while talking about torturing trans people, saying she wants trans people to die, be sterilized, and whatever else.
Shaun: These slogans are dog whistles: They're designed to seem innocuous to people who don't know otherwise, but the aim of the campaign behind those slogans is the elimination of trans people.
Shaun: That's quite a down a note to end on, isn’t it? But seriously, cis people watching this, stand with trans people. Reject this sort of bigoted propaganda, and recognize that it's the exact same sort of bigoted propaganda that's been used to hurt different minority groups all through history.
Shaun: Anyway, thanks a lot for watching, everyone, and thank you especially to all of my backers over on patreon, some of whom should be on the screen right now. Videos like this one take a lot of time and effort to make, and it wouldn't be possible without all of their support, so thank you very much to everyone who helped me out. Backers get early access to all of my videos, as well as the opportunity to mock me mercilessly for any mistakes I make in the first draft, so if that sounds like something you'd like to check out, I’ll leave a link to my patreon page below. Right. Thanks a lot for watching, everyone. I’ll see you next time.
