What is your opinion on Kellie Jay Keen?
What is your opinion on Kellie Jay Keen?
Jan 29 2025, 9:18 AM
(Jan 28 2025, 11:05 PM)wormwood I don’t have the receipts because, hey, I’m disorganised, but I was on the fringes of the gender critical scene in Britain from about 2014, left-leaning, organised to a great extent by grassroots Labour Party women: evidence-based collective feminist resistance to the appropriation of women’s rights.
A couple of yeas later, Posie Parker, as she called herself then, arrived on the scene with her Adult Human Female poster, and with her came a lot of publicity, and slowly at first, the white supremacists. She quarrelled with and insulted women who had started the movement, she flew across the Atlantic to meet with the Heritage Foundation, she started holding rallies with security who turned out to be racist thugs, and I’m pretty sure she also fundraised money that she never accounted for. I ran into her once at an event, she was barely on my radar and I didn’t recognise her, but she gave me the calculating look and the dazzling, “yes it’s famous me” smile of the true narcissist.
In short, my un-nuanced opinion is that she’s a smart female version of a very familiar type: Trump with two X chromosomes.
This is why I'm wary of the idea that we can separate the "good things" rightwing feminists do from the "bad things.". It sounds like your group had genuine feminist motivations/energy and KJK kind of came in and redirected that energy toward her own goal, damaging your original goal in the process.
I think there's an assumption that women like KJK are a necessary evil because GC will get nowhere without them. But that's an assumption, there's also an alternate timeline where KJK never showed up and your group was still successful. Maybe it would have taken longer for your group to make change without the populist figurehead, but maybe slow+steady with actual feminists is better than quick+dirty with rightwingers. I imagine KJK has made your group's original goal harder because now it's been "tainted" by the association with KJK and that automatically drives away left-leaning centrists and liberal/trans-inclusive feminists.
It's challenging because society also has a tendency to judge women 100x harsher than men, and that's not fair and feminists shouldn't do it. Like it's not okay that a man can be an asshole and still be considered smart and have his contributions valued, but if a woman is an asshole we tear her down and burn her contributions. But there's a line between "asshole" and "alt-right grifter" and I think maybe sometimes GC feminists over-correct because we're just so happy that someone is joining our team.
(Jan 28 2025, 11:05 PM)wormwood I don’t have the receipts because, hey, I’m disorganised, but I was on the fringes of the gender critical scene in Britain from about 2014, left-leaning, organised to a great extent by grassroots Labour Party women: evidence-based collective feminist resistance to the appropriation of women’s rights.
A couple of yeas later, Posie Parker, as she called herself then, arrived on the scene with her Adult Human Female poster, and with her came a lot of publicity, and slowly at first, the white supremacists. She quarrelled with and insulted women who had started the movement, she flew across the Atlantic to meet with the Heritage Foundation, she started holding rallies with security who turned out to be racist thugs, and I’m pretty sure she also fundraised money that she never accounted for. I ran into her once at an event, she was barely on my radar and I didn’t recognise her, but she gave me the calculating look and the dazzling, “yes it’s famous me” smile of the true narcissist.
In short, my un-nuanced opinion is that she’s a smart female version of a very familiar type: Trump with two X chromosomes.
This is why I'm wary of the idea that we can separate the "good things" rightwing feminists do from the "bad things.". It sounds like your group had genuine feminist motivations/energy and KJK kind of came in and redirected that energy toward her own goal, damaging your original goal in the process.
I think there's an assumption that women like KJK are a necessary evil because GC will get nowhere without them. But that's an assumption, there's also an alternate timeline where KJK never showed up and your group was still successful. Maybe it would have taken longer for your group to make change without the populist figurehead, but maybe slow+steady with actual feminists is better than quick+dirty with rightwingers. I imagine KJK has made your group's original goal harder because now it's been "tainted" by the association with KJK and that automatically drives away left-leaning centrists and liberal/trans-inclusive feminists.
It's challenging because society also has a tendency to judge women 100x harsher than men, and that's not fair and feminists shouldn't do it. Like it's not okay that a man can be an asshole and still be considered smart and have his contributions valued, but if a woman is an asshole we tear her down and burn her contributions. But there's a line between "asshole" and "alt-right grifter" and I think maybe sometimes GC feminists over-correct because we're just so happy that someone is joining our team.
