Slandering the women who "speak"

Pesutto says sorry: now it's Labor's turn

Let Women Speak rally, Melbourne, March 2023.

Photos by Natalie J. Russell

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In the prolonged fallout from Melbourne’s infamous Let Women Speak rally, gatecrashed by neo-Nazis, the state Opposition leader, John Pesutto, has issued an apology to two women who had sued him for defamation — the rally leader, Kellie-Jay Keen, otherwise known as Posie Parker, and her local associate, Angie Jones whose grossly under-reported story I’ll be focusing on here. Pesutto said: “It has never been my intention to convey that I believed Ms Keen and Ms Jones to be Neo-Nazis, or that they were members of Neo-Nazi groups.”

These women, Jones in particular, were collateral damage in Pesutto’s confrontation with MP Moira Deeming over her attendance and involvement in the rally. Deeming, as many will recall, was suspended from the Opposition Liberal Party, and then expelled after flagging her intention to sue Pesutto for defamation. Her action remains on foot. 

As for the settlement with Keen and Jones, Pesutto has said that no money changed hands. Otherwise, confidentiality clauses have gagged the respective parties. Fortunately, no-one’s gagging me, so herein I’ll be bagging Pesutto for several paragraphs — not least for an apology I judge to be not really that — before tossing him some praise. 

Jones, a single mother of four and long-time campaigner for women’s rights, last year told me about the devastating impact of his words on her life — I’m going to share her account with you. 

And lastly, I’ll be training my guns on the institutions I hold responsible for letting the trans rights debate spiral into toxic insanity: the Victorian state Labor Government and a gullible progressive media. 

Pesutto was guilty of panicked decision-making in the aftermath of the March 2023 rally. His problem was one of dreadful optics. Since his election as Liberal leader four months earlier, he had been trying to turn around the party’s image as a haven of hard right Christians, assorted reactionaries and dubious weirdos. Now here was one of his own MPs closely associated with what the media and the Government dubbed an “anti trans” rally — Deeming having helped Keen and Jones pull off the event. According to the theocratic dictates of identity politics this rally comprised the powerful (women) beating up on a group deemed the most vulnerable (trans people). 

The fact that two dozen black-clad, sieg heilling, neo-Nazis turned up to express, as they put it, support for Keen further tainted her and the cause in the minds of many. It was an unfair deduction. Having been on the scene myself I can attest the women would not even have sighted the men until the police escorted them away down Spring Street. 

The woman wearing a white hat and taking notes is yours truly. I was masked because I was recovering from my second bout of Covid.

But working backwards from the terrible optics on the day, Pesutto constructed an unreliable narrative of Deeming in alliance with people “who have known and established links with people who have Nazi sympathies who have white supremacist views and ethno-fascist views.” The accusation against Keen and Jones was therefore one of guilt by association, which made the accusation against Deeming one of guilt by association with guilt by association: in other words, a house of cards and complete bullocks.

He published a 15-page dossier purporting to set out the “evidence” against the two women. 

In respect of Keen his case was sourced from a false and misleading Wikipedia entry that suggested she self-identified as a Nazi and shared platforms with them. The worst that can be said about Keen is that she has a loose tongue and that she’ll grant an interview to anyone who comes knocking no questions asked, and sometimes that lands her in conversation with far-right characters — and at other times, with far-left characters. But these days misinformation finds fertile ground in sanctimonious newsrooms. At the time one editor at The Age told me it was pretty clear Keen was “associated with the far right” and that my column for the newspaper ought to reflect this almost certain reality. (The column was suppressed in any event.) Note to editors everywhere: when assessing highly controversial issues in which the very language is contested, do not assume Wikipedia is an authoritative source.

Moira Deeming at the rally.

Kellie-Jay Keen

If the case against Keen was based on a malicious stitch up, the case against Jones was a travesty far, far worse as it was based on one tweet. In the aftermath of the rally, Jones was trading insults on Twitter with a regular antagonist. She made a throwaway remark that the only thing the women protestors and “Nazis” agree on is wanting to “get rid of paedo filth.” This debate, alas, is awash with talk about “paedos” for reasons we’ll deal with another time. Now who in the wonderful world of Twitter has never posted a dumb tweet? But in the unhinged Wokeistan that is Victoria one dumb tweet posted in reply to one person in the course of one dumb conversation is enough for a person in authority to brand a private citizen a Nazi sympathiser, or worse. 

Even a person with impeccable left-wing credentials, as is the case with Jones.

When I first met her in a cafe halfway between Melbourne and her home in the Yarra Ranges, she immediately began speaking about class and how it shaped her leftist politics. She spoke also of her Jewish grandmother who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 to England where she worked as a nurse. (Although I know I don’t have to tell Jones that being Jewish doesn’t stop people accusing you of being a Nazi.)

Jones grew up on a public housing estate in Moe, Gippsland, and attended the local high school. Her father was the regional rep for the Transport Workers Union; she grew up manning picket lines. Her mother grew up exposed to asbestos from Jones’s grandfather, a worker at the Yallourn West power station. Neither parent lived to a ripe old age. She has a brother who is profoundly disabled. 

Jones was among the rare few in her milieu to go to university. She has worked with survivors of rape and domestic violence. And like many women who encounter the daily toll of male violence, Jones is a fierce-defender of single-sex services. 

Angie Jones. Source: Twitter

We rarely acknowledge the classist dynamic of gender identity ideology.

Because it typically takes a person of charming life experience to genuinely believe human beings can change sex. Only a person from the most sheltered background could disavow that predators will exploit laws lacking in safeguards, such as the Victorian law allowing men to simply declare themselves women, as surely as night follows day. A person inclined to such magical thinking is unlikely to have encountered rape during wartime or the casual brutality of men in settings where women are vulnerable. Such a person is more likely to experience “gender relations” as a set of fantastical propositions in a lecture on “queer theory” than at the coalface of male violence. (For a searing read on the realities of sex oppression that middle-class feminists struggle to grasp, see this piece from Róisín Michaux and this from Julie Bindel.)

To return to Jones, she immediately struck me as unaffected, candid, piercingly intelligent and on her own admission obsessive in the fight to win back women’s boundaries from gender self ID. At the time we met she spoke of being too scared to venture into the city. Online she was snowed with abuse and death threats. The glare of publicity in the wake of Pesutto’s remarks had even impacted her family; her school-aged daughter shunned by her friends. 

“I feel like I worked so hard to get where I am, pulled myself up by my bootstraps,” she said, welling up, “only to have him (Pesutto) knock me back down.”

And then her own side kicked her while she was down. Some months after our conversation, Victorian Labor blocked her on Twitter. “I don’t know why but I can’t stop crying,” she told me. 

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The impact the “Nazi sympathiser” allegations had on Keen is a matter of public record. The vilification she suffered in the wake of the Melbourne rally whipped into an atmosphere of incitement that followed her to Auckland where her Let Women Speak event was assailed by a violent mob. She was doused in tomato juice, taunted with placards reading “Suck My Dick” and barely scrambled to safety. A woman in her seventies was punched in the face. But on one telling the intimidation was righteous resistance because, after all, Keen and her followers were brownshirts in the drag of middle-aged women. 

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Pesutto’s accusations against Keen and Jones, and by extension against Deeming, had all the integrity of a witch hunt. The issue here is not whether these women prosecute their cause with impeccable judgment, always parsing their words carefully. They don’t, not least because the radical trans activists have venomous ad hominem attack as their default. At a quasi post-match briefing uploaded onto YouTube the evening after the rally, the three women, together with once Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, clinked champagne glasses, and appeared tone deaf to the controversy raging around them, although this was really only a problem for Deeming — as a parliamentarian she has a responsibility to vigorously condemn fascists should they surface in her vicinity. That’s not to justify what I believe is the appalling treatment Pesutto and his allies meted out to her. 

Trans activist counter-protestors

While Jones and Keen expressed gratitude for Pesutto’s apology, I find it a frustrating read. He apologises for “any hurt, distress or harm that has occurred” if people misunderstood his words to mean that he believed the two women were neo-Nazis. He has apparently never believed that, even though he had told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell: “I know Moira Deeming is not a Nazi but my point is she’s associating with people who are.” By “people” he quite obviously meant Jones and Keen.

“People engaged in robust public debate do not always have the ability to express themselves perfectly,” Pesutto blathers ambiguously in his apology. 

“This is one reason that we should give those we may disagree with some benefit of the doubt.” Great — except that’s precisely what he didn’t do in this instance and won’t do even now: “It is also now clear from public statements made by Ms Keen and Ms Jones that they share my belief that Nazism is odious and contemptible.” 

In any event he has not apologised for his centrepiece accusation that Keen and Jones were “associated” with far-right individuals and neo-Nazi groups — an allegation that is as much cowardly and meaningless as it is rubbish. And in the case of Jones, utterly, unconscionably rubbish.

Still: I come not to diss Pesutto but to praise him. His apology does recognise that both women have a long history of women’s rights advocacy and that these rights are under threat. 

“I agree with them that genuine community concerns regarding women’s safety and access to single-sex spaces, services and sport warrant meaningful public discussion.”

This statement is significant and most welcome; it legitimises criticism of the Victorian Government’s quiet dismantling in law and policy of the concept of biological sex. If Pesutto is willing to open space for rational debate on Labor’s various social policy misadventures he may find a surprising number of voters flocking to him in relief. 

Keen’s Let Women Speak roadshow resonates because progressives, and most disgracefully, progressive governments, silence and demonise anyone who dares raise questions about male sex offenders in women’s prisons or the sanctity of women’s sport or the rights of lesbians to fraternise without harassment from people with penises, or the welfare of teenage girls who hate their sexed bodies and in the first instance need ethical, exploratory therapy and not testosterone and double mastectomy. 

As Bernard Lane reported, a senior official of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission recently told a public webinar that the UK’s Cass report, in which eminent paediatrician Hilary Cass recommended restricting medicalised transition for gender-distressed adolescents and teens, was akin to “disinformation” from a “village idiot”. Kenton Miller also falsely claimed the Cass review’s survey of the evidence for youth gender medicine was “based on a very limited number of studies only within the UK.” Do these comments suggest that a healthy intellectual culture prevails in our state institutions?

And while Pesutto slandered three women in the rally’s aftermath, then premier Dan Andrews slandered everyone who turned up to Let Women Speak, explicitly conflating a bunch of predominantly middle-aged lesbians with neo-Nazis. “Anti-trans activists gathered to spread hate,” he tweeted the following day. “And on the steps of our Parliament, some of them performed a Nazi salute.” His words negatively impacted on the lives of many of the women. His words were also designed to deter scrutiny of his government’s policies — understandably, considering the policies, introduced under stealth without a public mandate, would not bear up under scrutiny. 

Unlike Pesutto, neither Andrews nor his government have apologised for falsely calling the brave protestors at Let Women Speak neo-Nazis.