NOTTINGHAM — Where Victim Narratives Collide

Where is Speakers’ Corner in England? If you answered Hyde Park, you would be correct, but there is another Speakers’ Corner, in Nottingham, near the statue of Brian Clough. Football fans and those of a certain age will remember this soccer player turned manager as a speaker par excellence, one of those people you couldn’t shut up. He was a plain-speaking sort of dude, a father of three including a daughter. Had he still been alive, he would have had a lot to say on Sunday when a group of women – adult human females – turned up to speak on the subject of women’s spaces. What would Brian Clough have thought of the suggestion that women’s changing rooms and other spaces should be open to biological males, that when his daughter was growing up in the 1970s the girl with the locker next to her could have been a girl in name only? When he realised it wasn’t a joke, he would have said something unprintable.

Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull is no stranger to profanity either, although she tries not to swear in front of the camera. She was the organiser of this event, which would have been better attended but for the inclement weather. Having said that, there was an augmented turnout from a group of dudes wearing dresses, or trans women as they call themselves.

Kellie-Jay no longer calls herself a feminist, but not because she recognises feminism for what it is, an authoritarian movement dressed up as a plausible but totally false victim narrative. Much of the feminist movement, now in its third wave, has allowed itself to be co-opted by the trans movement, a small group of mostly men who identify as women. Some, the very few, have had gender reassignment surgery, like the full works, but most are biological males, and even those who have gone the whole hog are still males after a fashion, the fashion of a eunuch.

What were the dudes in dresses doing? They were counter-protesters, not like we used to see anytime so-called racists turned out to protest against immigration, or as recently in Telford, child sexual abuse. There was no violence here, only playing the victim, although at one point someone did cut off Kellie’s microphone, and there were attempts to drown out the real women, who responded “Let women speak”.

There must be a joke there somewhere, but this is no laughing matter. Nottingham is currently holding a series of women’s only workshops; no one seems to have complained about that. There will be further meetings of this growing movement and, hopefully, common sense will eventually prevail. Men lose nothing by being kept out of women’s spaces, the practice keeps women safe, it also safeguards men from being accused of sexual harassment and worse ten, twenty, thirty years down the line, something a much maligned Arab trader figured out fourteen hundred years ago.