Vindication in the Federal Court

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Moira Deeming at Let Women Speak, March 2023.

Rally photos by Natalie J. Russell

**

So how are we going with the whole trans issues are politically “fringe” schtick?

I’m talking about the idea, usually delivered as a homily from progressive pundits, that our leaders are unlikely to suffer political blowback for implementing a radical “trans rights” agenda because no one apart from Christians and radical feminists gives a damn?

Well, let’s survey the recent casualties. There’s Scotland’s former chief minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Last February she dithered before the cameras when asked if she considered two-time convicted rapist Isla Bryson, blonde wig brushed over his face tatts just so, a “woman.” Already engulfed in an unrelated scandal, Sturgeon was now also a laughing stock — within weeks she resigned. Kamala Harris and the Biden administration became a laughing stock, and the butt of a killer pro-Trump campaign ad, for aggressively promoting the inclusion of males in women’s sport and the rights of prisoners to publicly-funded sex-change surgeries. We know how that election turned out.

And now, down-under in the state of Victoria, Opposition leader John Pesutto found himself on Thursday wiping the egg from his face, and wondering how he might cough up $300,000 in damages and a likely costs bill of several million, after the Federal Court ruled he had on multiple occasions defamed his parliamentary colleague Moira Deeming in the aftermath of Melbourne’s infamous Let Women Speak rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.

As the patron saint of TERFs (c’mon, look the term up if you still don’t know) J.K Rowling put it, in a tweet congratulating Deeming:

“The ‘right side of history’ is racking up a hell of a lot of losses recently, isn’t it?”

**

Deeming had alleged Pesutto falsely portrayed her as knowingly associating with neo-Nazis and being a neo-Nazi sympathiser. While Pesutto remains leader of his party, the judgment has galvanised his internal critics and rivals. At the time of writing a Liberal party room meeting has been called for Friday. The only certainty in the immediate future is a run of bad headlines for the Liberals.

Ah the irony! For a run of bad headlines was precisely what Pesutto had been hoping to avoid with his strenuous efforts to evict Deeming from the parliamentary party. As the voluminous evidence in the case revealed — and as anyone with a half-functional political antenna already sussed — in the rally’s aftermath Pesutto was spooked at the prospect of being “clobbered” by premier Daniel Andrews and his cheerleaders in the progressive media in the event he did not move against Deeming.

As it happened, the episode has turned into a long-running series, and exposed the injustice inflicted on Deeming, on the rally organisers and on the other women present at the protest last March. Victoria is clearly the place to be if you want to annex the city every weekend to call for the elimination by any means necessary of the world’s only Jewish state; but gather once in a blue moon to insist sex is real and it matters and our esteemed leaders line up to accuse you of Nazism.

Extreme transactivists and our ideologically-captured institutions of state have largely managed to suppress public debate on contentious policies surrounding sex and gender by demonising prominent critics of gender self-ID — a regime enabling anyone to change their legal sex through a simple bureaucratic process — as Nazi-adjacent bigots.

So, naturally, the Labor party and the Greens were overjoyed at the optics the day of the rally for here were a bunch of TERFS and their allies literally adjacent to several dozen men in black who the media generously affirmed as “Nazis.” (As one devastatingly astute journalist friend put it: “Oh the pearl clutching about ‘actual Nazis’ .. as though those cosplaying ninnies had come straight from the annexation of the Sudetenland.”)

Trans activist counter-protestors

Leaders brazenly conflated the disproportionately leftist women at the Let Women Speak rally with the neo-Nazis. Federal MP Josh Burns tweeted of “the ugly alliance” between “anti-trans bullies” and neo-Nazis on display in the city. “I’m disgusted by the anti-trans rally in Melbourne,” tweeted Greens leader Adam Bandt MP, “protected by their allies: saluting neo-Nazis.” Then this from premier Daniel Andrews himself: “Anti-trans activists gathered to spread hate .. And on the steps of our Parliament, some of them performed a Nazi salute.”

At this point an alternative, imaginary Pesutto, the Pesutto I’m still hoping might one day materialise, expressed his disgust about the men Sieg Heil’ing on the steps of parliament while also defending against attack the innocent women rallying that day, including his own MP.

The actual Pesutto panicked. He was already wary of Deeming who had attracted sneering coverage for her Christian conservatism, frustrating his ambitions to remake the Liberals image as moderate and electable in a state widely thought of as “progressive.” In court, Pesutto went as far as to allege that Deeming had had a bad reputation even before he sought to expel her from the party. It is worth setting out Justice O’Callaghan’s scathing finding here:

“I do not accept that Mrs Deeming had or has a ‘bad reputation’ or a ‘damaged’ reputation. The evidence established that she, like all politicians, has her detractors on the other ‘side’ of politics, some of whom, like Mr Andrews and [Victorian Greens leader] Ms [Samantha] Ratnam, called her ‘hateful’. That may be a reflection of what nowadays passes for political debate, but it is not, as Mr Pesutto’s counsel sought to contend, evidence of the fact (his emphasis) that Mrs Deeming has hateful views or gives succour to them.

“And as I explained above, Mr Pesutto’s evidence about what he called Mrs Deeming’s bad reputation was gratuitously offensive, because, when asked to justify the slur, he could not.”

In any event, to head off what he knew would be a “clobbering” from Andrews, Pesutto sought to get rid of Deeming by smearing her as having Nazi associations, a smear that in turn rested on slanderous allegations against the rally organisers, the British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen (also known as Posie Parker) and her local helper, Angie Jones. Earlier this year Pesutto settled a separate defamation action brought by Keen and Jones with what I’ve described as an inadequate apology.

Kellie-Jay Keen

The smear campaign was easy to pull off because from the moment Keen arrived in Australia for her global Let Women Speak tour, the woke media industrial complex went into overdrive airing allegations of her supposed links to the far right. These allegations were based largely on a Wikipedia entry containing outright falsehoods and gross distortions.

The falsehoods and distortions were already exposed as such by the time Pesutto circulated to the Liberal party room and the media his dossier purportedly outlining the politically putrid waters in which swam Keen and Jones, and therefore by association, Deeming. His case against his colleague was ultimately one of guilt by association with guilt by association — as Justice O’Callaghan found, Pesutto’s “frequent” use of the word “associate”, “associated” and “association” left himself open to reasonable people drawing adverse interpretations from his remarks.

The dossier replicated the discredited falsehoods and gross distortions of the original Wikipedia entry on Keen. It was also a vile and despicable hit-job on Jones. “Material exculpatory” of the two women and Deeming was, in the judge’s diplomatic phrasing, “inexplicably omitted” from the final version of the dossier.

So cynical was the fit-up that one news article included in the dossier was missing the last page, which just happened to contain Keen’s convincing refutation of the allegation she associated with extremists or sympathised with their views. As for Jones, the entire case against her rested on one errant tweet that she made in reply to one of her sparring partners on Twitter — had the dossier included the entire exchange with this individual it would have been clear that far from associating with fascists, Jones, a veteran leftist, in fact abhorred fascists with every fibre of her being.

Angie Jones. Source: X

In a normal world the media might have scrutinised the dodgy dossier and asked if the public ought to trust a party that knee-caps one of its own by circulating a conveniently incomplete news story.

In our abnormal world the fact I attended the Let Women Speak protest out of professional curiosity (see once again, the photographic evidence below) saw me branded an extremist in The Age newsroom.

My column about the rally was spiked for being the “wrong” take. I was told by an editor that the Wikipedia entry left little doubt Keen was associated with the far right. (I really hope the paper has since learned that Wiki is not a reliable source when it comes to highly contentious subjects — so, like, probably not a great idea to consult it on Israel-Palestine.) My commissioned piece on youth gender transition was spiked because, as Media Watch later reported, I was perceived as “too close” to gender-critical activists. Never mind The Age had invited an actual trans activist into the newsroom to advise journalists on avoiding “harm” in their reporting without inviting anyone with an opposing view for balance.

Me at the infamous rally. I’m masked because I was recovering from Covid

The rally was the catalyst that led to my sacking as a columnist after I called out The Age’s pattern of censorship on trans issues. (After which I started this Substack that has now passed 3K subscribers, and attracts plenty more lurkers such that some months I get 30K or more views — so thanks heaps everyone, please keep spreading the word and now we return to our program.) For other women present on that day the fallout was far worse. For Jones, a single mother, being tarred with the Nazi brush had a devastating impact on her and her children — see my piece here for more detail.

As a result of her attendance at the rally, the “gender critical” feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith came under investigation from her employer, Melbourne University — the investigation found she had no case to answer — and confronted a campaign of intimidation against her and her students from transactivist thugs on campus that included vandalising a university building, this being months before anti-Israel protestors made vandalising university buildings an almost routine occurrence. The university was forced to deploy security guards outside Lawford-Smith’s lectures.

Keen’s vilification 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 wielding placards such as “Suck My Dick.” She was doused in tomato juice and barely scrambled to safety. A woman in her seventies was punched in the face.

And Deeming, the court found, suffered damage to her reputation which was not already bad, in fact it had been good.

Neither Daniel Andrews nor Josh Burns nor Adam Bandt has apologised for tarring with the Nazi brush every woman at the rally and unleashing a wave of violent misogyny against them. And the slander persists within our public institutions. At the recent tribunal hearing into whether the Lesbian Action Group should be entitled to hold events exclusively for “lesbians born female” — meaning males identifying as women would be excluded — the Australian Human Rights Commission called on an independent expert who gave evidence that lesbians of this sort share common ground with Nazis.

In the Federal Court last week Justice O’Callaghan delivered vindication to all women, and men too, who have dared express mainstream concerns about gender identity ideology. In doing so he made an outsize contribution to normalising debate on radical social policies that (mainly) Labor governments have imposed by stealth on the public. He showed it’s not that hard to distinguish facts from ideology and gaslighting. I especially loved his dismissal of the apparently notorious “champagne video” on the night of the rally in which Keen, Jones, failed Liberal candidate Katherine Deves and Deeming engaged in a quasi post-match analysis. Pesutto had cited the video in his case against Deeming. If you believed the woke lynch mob the video was only a few steps removed from the Wannsee Conference.

“A considered viewing of the champagne video,” explains Justice O’Callaghan, “would also have disabused the ordinary reasonable viewer of the notion that Ms Keen, Ms Deves, Ms Jones or Ms Deeming shared right-wing views or associated with neo-Nazis or anything vaguely of the sort.”

You see, it’s really not that hard to distinguish Nazis or their associates from a bunch of middle-aged women incandescent about the erosion of their rights and fed up with the malignant response from authorities undeserving of the public’s trust. It’s really not that hard to distinguish Nazis from brave women even when the premier himself screams “burn the witches!”

I found it fitting that in the same week the Federal Court handed down its judgment in the Deeming case, the UK’s Labour government announced an indefinite ban on puberty blockers as a treatment for minors distressed about their birth sex on the grounds that continuing to allow them would carry an “unacceptable safety risk.” Health Secretary Wes Streeting said:

“It is a scandal that medicine was given to vulnerable young children without the proof that it is safe or effective or through the rigorous safeguards of a clinical trial.”

It is a scandal that persists in Australia where health authorities and gender clinicians around the country continue to insist there’s nothing to see here. And that anyone suggesting otherwise is adjacent to… you guessed it.