Let Women Speak is just what it sounds like, an event aimed at giving women a platform. Anyone who shows up can speak, with one simple rule: women first. This might sound banal – hasn’t feminism long since gone mainstream? What exactly is it that a woman needs to be able to say, and can’t say, without an event like this?
It’s true that a certain sort of feminism has long since gone mainstream. But there’s a new feminism in town, one that must be doing something right judging by the number of men it has riled up. Gender-critical feminism, with close links to the earlier radical feminism, rejects large swathes of received feminist wisdom, not to mention large swathes of current leftist dogma more generally.
Gender-critical feminists have reclaimed biological sex, having no truck with the idea that because men historically defined women the correct solution is to have no definition at all, or that any definition resting on a shared biological feature is ‘essentialist’ (meant pejoratively). We’ve also reclaimed our history, considering women as a sex class whose members span not just across the world, but back thousands of years.
Gender-critical feminists don’t think it’s enough that someone is merely feminine, or looks like a woman, as some men are, and do: they care about what has been done, and continues to be done, to females. Our project is non-partisan, because anyone from anywhere on the political spectrum can care about women’s sex-based rights and political interests.
One particular concern gender-critical feminists have at the moment is the ideology of gender identity, which minimises or dismisses sex, claiming for example that it’s a social construct, or imposed by colonisers. Activists promoting this ideology want gender identity to replace sex, and all social and legal practices that previously tracked sex to shift, correspondingly, to gender identity.
Let Women Speak events give women a place to express their fears and frustrations with this new ideology. In Victoria, it is already firmly in place, and became that way without any public consultation.
Victoria has self-identification for sex, meaning any man can pay a small fee and sign a statutory declaration to change his legal sex to ‘female’. Our Human Rights Commission appears intent on understanding gender identity as taking precedence over sex in our equal opportunity law, even while claiming there is no hierarchy of attributes. We have conversion therapy legislation that makes it difficult and dangerous for adults to take a cautious approach to children’s gender identity claims. The state is also likely to extend vilification protections to include gender identity this year.
Understandably then, Victorian women, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual people, and those interested in protecting gender non-conforming children, were eager for an opportunity to come together and voice their concerns about the implications of all these laws and related policy changes.
The organiser of Let Women Speak is the charismatic and outspoken Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, the most prominent figure in the global gender-critical feminist movement. She has personally repudiated the label ‘feminist’, partly in order to emphasise that the movement is open to all women, whatever their other beliefs. But Keen’s organisation in the UK is called ‘Standing For Women’, and she’s been active in defending women’s sex-based rights and interests since 2015.
Among the speakers in Melbourne on Saturday were women who spoke about: the shift to gender-neutral language in female healthcare; the value of female-only spaces to mothers and grandmothers; how they have been mistreated because of their advocacy for women’s sex-based rights; society not letting girls be tomboys anymore; losing their children to gender identity ideology; the rise in anti-feminist propaganda; transitioning autistic people and the capture of autistic organisations by gender identity ideology; lesbians’ sex-based rights; being concerned with the state’s disrespect for women’s boundaries; disillusionment with the left over gender identity issues; the need to call out local politicians for failing to take women’s interests seriously; challenging the sexual objectification and use of girls and women; urging other women to join the gender-critical movement.
At any such event there’s always a standout speaker, and Melbourne’s was a young woman wearing red and pink headphones: ‘I was raised on the tolerant left. I used to be an ally. So like most, when Covid hit, I ended up chronically online. It was during that time that I finally saw just how deranged the left had become. That there was no way around it; my tolerant left had gone and lost its f**king mind. […] Misogyny – that slimy hand around women’s throats that I saw as a child – misogyny had had a revamp, it was glamorous now all sparkly, it had some flags and new allies: violent beta males wearing hankies on their faces, giving a wink and a nod to their comrades while screaming down women who just don’t fancy having girld**k shoved in their daughter’s faces in the changerooms at the pool.’
In the first break between speakers, Kellie-Jay commented: ‘Right throughout Australia so far, the women here, it’s like you’ve been saving it for so long, because the speeches are so damn good.’
I think she’s right – we’ve been waiting for something to happen, something that would give us a moment not just to speak, but to be heard. We thought Kellie-Jay’s visit might just be that moment. There’s an irony, then, in how systematically our event has been erased from the narrative about what happened on Saturday on Spring Street.
