Gender Critical grifter Posie Parker invites gun-carrying men into women’s toilets to “protect women”
Despite men being the biggest threat of violence to women, Parker’s transphobia drove her to invite them into women’s toilets.
In a now deleted video on her YouTube channel, transphobic grifter Posie Parker — a.k.a. Kellie-Jay Keen — called for men carrying guns to start using women’s toilets. During a typical fearmongering screed about the supposed threat trans women are to cis women in toilets, Parker said:
[I’ve] had a bit of a think 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 some absolute connection with them to feel compelled to protect us. I think you should start using women’s toilets, men …
Parker’s bright idea is in part that Men With Guns can protect helpless cis women from the mean ol’ trans women. Transphobes say that trans women are really men pretending to be women and sneaking into women’s toilets to assault cis women. Or they say giving more rights to trans women will allow men to pretend to be women and sneak into women’s toilets to assault women. In short, they claim their fear is that men will sneak into women’s toilets and assault women. And yet … here is Parker asking men to enter women’s toilets — and with guns. It’s further evidence that Gender Critical people and TERFs are driven by an irrational hatred of trans people, not by any rational truths. Transphobia has deluded them. The truth is, men are the biggest threat of violence towards women — and usually the perpetrators are men known by the women they assault (their fathers, husbands, friends). Parker’s idea is revealing in its illogic — and, if implemented, would result in a horribly predictable increase in assaults on women, the very thing Gender Critial people and TERFs claim to want to avoid.
We know, not just because of probability, that assaults would increase because what Parker proposed — the policing of women’s toilets, including by men with guns — has already been done and it lead to an increase in assaults on and harassment of women (why Parker doesn’t seem to know this is also revealing: perhaps she’s just talking shit off the top of her head because she’s a transphobic grifter). In Texas in April 2016, for example, a man barged into the women’s toilets at a medical centre and harassed a women because he thought she was a man. The same month, in the US three police officers — two men and one women — forced a lesbian out of a women’s toilets because she couldn’t prove her gender, and in the UK a lesbian was mistaken for a man by another women in the women’s toilets in a McDonald’s and was kicked out of the restaurant. In California the following month, a woman was harassed in a supermarket toilet because another women thought she was transgender. These all happened within the (inter)national controversy surrounding the passing in March 2016 of a North Carolina bill forcing trans people to used the toilets of the gender they were assigned at birth. It’s interesting to note that in all of these examples the harassment was as a result of the policing of women’s toilets itself. The very thing that transphobes call for to supposedly make women safer actually makes women less safe and increases the harassment they experience, including in the toilets. Thankfully for trans people and cis women, the ridiculous law was later repealed, thanks to a legal challenge brought by trans people.
Another thing transphones seem to ignore is that trans people have for decades been using the toilets that align with their identity and what transphobes fearmonger about has not happened: trans women have not been assaulting cis women and, when anti-discrimination laws are passed, there isn’t an increase in men assaulting women in women’s toilets. Men might assault women in women’s toilets, of course, or film them, etc. — but they don’t need anti-discrimination laws or to pretend to be women to enable them to do it. They’ve been doing it long before there were anti-discrimination laws. As Paris Lees puts it, “The horrible truth is that, if a man wants to assault a woman, he can do so anywhere”. Regardless of what laws are in place, men will assault women, including in women’s toilets — and yet Parker and her ilk, brain-addled by their transphobia, invite men in.
In reality, the people most likely to be assaulted anywhere are trans women — in the US, for example, trans women are twice as likely to experience sexual violence compared to others; in the UK, trans people are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people. In Baltimore in 2011, a girl and a woman dragged a trans woman called Chrissy Lee Polis out of the women’s toilets by her hair and beat her until she had a seizure, all the while restaurant staff and customers looked on and filmed the attack. It’s hardly surprising that nearly half of all transgender people in the UK don’t feel comfortable using public toilets. If TERFs really were feminists, they would be concerned about the violence trans people face and work to overturn the patriarchal system that attacks all women.
