Have you heard of Posie Parker? She’s a 5 ft 1 mum of four from Wiltshire, England who looks an awful lot like Marilyn Monroe and has a truly radical belief – that the definition of ‘woman’ is the one that which appears in the Google dictionary: adult human female. But what about men who identify as women? Cockburn asked her. ‘They’re not women’, Posie replied bluntly.
Golly!
Cockburn met Posie and her female friends – Venice Allan, kicked out of the British Labour Party for saying that only females can be women, and Dr Julia Long, researcher and activist for the first time in Washington D.C., last weekend. Cockburn was blown away by their good company and by their fearless commitment to stating the obvious.
From fighting the notorious clinical activist – Mr Harrop – on Sky News to providing women across the UK with ‘adult human female’ T-shirts, Posie has been a leader in the resistance to the proposed changes to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act.
Up and down the UK, statues of #women have been dressed in the dictionary definition of woman – #adulthumanfemale.
Woman is not a feeling.
Women will not be silenced.
We are growing. #ReSisters#womenstandup#standingforwomen#ReSistersUnited#Liverpool pic.twitter.com/GsYI0jfsYn
— @LiverpoolReSisters (@LiverpoolReSis1) January 28, 2019
If reformed as trans activists would like, the GRA would enable a person to change his legal gender simply by filling out a form. The implications of this have disturbed many adult human females. Especially after the case of Karen White – a rapist born a man, but who identifies as a woman – who was put in a women’s prison, where White was able to abuse females.
Likewise, human females in America face an uphill struggle in the form of the Equality Act. The Equality Act, which is on the House’s agenda and is likely to pass, would continue the legacy of Obama in interpreting sex to mean ‘gender identity’ – both for civil rights protection and for federally funded entities.
Posie and her galpals flew to America last week to raise awareness and hold those responsible to account.
‘This ideology has been imported into the UK by America. So to stem the flow of female erasure we have to come to its source’, Posie told Cockburn.
‘What the Equality Act will do is it will replace women’s sex-based rights and protections with gender identity. So, in one swift move, women will no longer have sex-based rights in the USA. Which will be an unprecedented roll back of women’s rights in America.’
‘We’re over here to lend our support to our sisters in America who no one else is listening to,’ Julia added.
It certainly seems like no one is listening. Britain had a fierce left-on-left national debate around the Gender Recognition Act. But where is the American equivalent?
In a cozy library in D.C., Cockburn attended Posie and friends’ panel event ‘Women Stand Up’, where members of the radical feminist organization, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and the Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, who has been kicked off of Twitter for identifying a trans sex offender as male, spoke on the perils of the Equality Act and transgender ideology.
Incidentally, a transgender spy was also there – tweeting about how ‘gross’ it was for women to say that women are women. Fortunately, however, his disguise was easy to detect. Security guards were present. He was welcome to stay and tweet rude things of course, as long as he didn’t make a scene.
At one point a 19-year-old lesbian stood up and shared her story about how she had been preyed upon by the trans cult and had had a double mastectomy – a decision she bitterly regrets. Many were moved to tears.
The next day, Cockburn sat next to Posie at a separate bipartisan event put on by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in which more stories like this were shared by progressive parents who had been ignored by the Left as well as a thorough debunking of ‘gender identity’ ideology’s most outlandish claims.
One mother’s story particularly stood out. After a 14-year-old announced she was male, she reported her parents to Child Services for refusing to use male pronouns, was taught to inject herself with testosterone by a doctor, ran away to Oregon and had a mastectomy and radical hysterectomy under state law. She is now planning on having her arm grafted in order to construct a fake penis. With a history of mental illness, this child’s self-harm has been emboldened by ‘gender identity’ laws.
Today, Cockburn received a phone call from Posie.
Posie and Julia had been back to the Hill, meeting with more Congress people, when they’d stumbled upon a congressional hearing organized by transgender ideologues. They then spotted Sarah McBride. McBride is a transgender activist – born a man, but who presents as a woman – who, as national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign lobbies the government to advance the Equality Act.
McBride had just met with Rep. Joe Kennedy and there was a film crew nearby. On behalf of every woman, parent and child suffering under the madness of gender identity ideology and ignored by the mainstream media – Posie and Julia took their chance confronted McBride.
They ventured forth…
Posie explained her thinking to Cockburn. ‘I thought: When am I going to get this opportunity again to talk someone so powerful in the business of lobbying?…In this culture of silence bringing this issue into the public consciousness can never be counterproductive…I will take my lead from the mothers who are facing the catastrophic mutilation and irreversible damage to their daughters’ bodies.’
The consequence, inevitably, was that this was then spun into a ‘transphobic ambush’ narrative. HuffPost ran a story with the headline, ‘2 Women Disrupt Meeting To Harass Transgender Activist In Appalling Video’. Gay Star News went with, ‘Shocking video shows women barging into meeting and harassing trans woman’.
Was this harassment? The ‘two women’ don’t think so.
‘I am bewildered by the characterization of us being in a position of power and influence so that our questions are being called harassment. We were in the corridors of the Senate building in the land of free speech. That doesn’t square! Questions cannot be harassment’, Posie said.
She added, ‘I didn’t wear a mask. I didn’t have a baseball in trans remembrance colors. I didn’t say I want to punch anybody. I didn’t call him names. I didn’t swear at him. I didn’t intimidate him physically. I didn’t threaten violence. I didn’t commit violence. I asked a man pertinent questions about his lobbying.’
Admittedly, their behavior wasn’t very polite. Cockburn pointed this out, but Julia took a dim view of such criticism.
‘I think politeness is irrelevant here. This man is championing a law that means that men will have increased access to the most vulnerable women in prisons, shelters, sports, education establishments … he’s championing the end of women’s sex-based rights. He’s also championing terrible hormone regimes and surgeries for children.’
Posie, who is pro-choice, added: ‘Most of those critics would have no issue if I’d gone in a room with Mike Pence and asked him why he disagrees with abortion in aggressive terms. I could have verbally assaulted him with bad language, and everybody would think it was great. Yet women who purport to be in opposition to gender ideology tend to uphold it with their double standards, as if a powerful lobbyist is somehow vulnerable if they identify as a woman.’
Yet, in Britain, various gender critical feminists have tweeted to say that they are disapproving of Posie and Julia’s actions. Some claimed that they had ‘ambushed’ the powerful lobbyist.
Posie Parker & Julia Long are a liability. I’d be mortified to be ambushed like that. Their jaunt to Washington is setting back a productive conversation, in US context, about female rights by decades. I’ve nothing to do with them anyway, but no-one should think they act for me.
— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) January 31, 2019
Cockburn asked Posie and Julia what they would say to such critics. Their answer?
‘I would rather you just said thank you.’
