Mick Hartley

Joanna Williams – Is it now ‘far right’ to be a feminist?

Say ‘far-right extremism’ and most people will think of fascism. Perhaps Hitler, Nazis and swastikas. Or closer to home, it’s Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Or the National Front of the 1970s. Far less likely to spring to mind are feminists defending women’s rights. Or concerned parents who object to the sexualisation of children and to libraries hosting drag queens.

Incredibly, both of these groups feature in a new report from campaign group Hope Not Hate. State of Hate 2023: Rhetoric, Racism and Resentment is promoted as ‘the most comprehensive and analytical guide to the state of far-right extremism in Britain today’. Comprehensive is one word for it. The report details everything and everyone the report’s authors dislike, from GB News presenters to gender-critical feminist Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker). This is less a piece of research and more a very long temper tantrum.

Hope Not Hate highlights protests against Drag Queen Story Hour events as an example of ‘far-right agitation’. The report disingenuously describes these drag events as simply ‘storytelling sessions for children at public libraries’. It then labels as problematic those who ask why men with fake boobs and fishnet stockings are so keen to read to young children. ‘The far right sees trans rights as a fundamental challenge to their belief in traditional gender roles and family structures’, Hope Not Hate tells us. 

But it's the trans activists, not the protesters, who are the ones defending traditional gender roles. If you're a boy who likes playing with dolls you must really be a girl. If you're a girl who likes football you must really be a boy. Off to the clinic with you for some medical procedures. Objecting to sexualised caricatures of women reading stories to young children has nothing to do with preserving "traditional gender roles and family structures".

Hope Not Hate claims that anti-trans rhetoric is becoming ‘increasingly vocal and aggressive among the far right’. And, of course, what it describes as ‘anti-trans rhetoric’ can be anything from misgendering someone to defending women’s sex-based rights. This is where Kellie-Jay Keen gets a mention, as an ‘anti-trans activist’ who has ‘increasingly found support from and an overlap in views with the far right’. Her iconic ‘woman: adult human female’ posters and Let Women Speak events have long attracted opprobrium from trans activists. State of Hate confirms Keen’s status as a ‘leading voice in the anti-trans movement’.

When highlighting the dictionary definition of ‘woman’ is enough to have you associated with the ‘far right’ then we really are in dire straits. Feminism was one of the great progressive causes of the previous century. The old campaigns for the economic, social and political equality of the sexes are still rightly celebrated today. And yet those who want to defend sex-based rights, rights that feminists fought so hard for, are today dismissed as transphobic bigots….

For all the ridiculous talk of Kellie-Jay Keen being allied in some way with the ‘far right’, it’s the trans activists who are the real reactionaries here. They are the ones rolling back the gains of feminism, and they are the ones waging a war on women’s rights.

A century ago, women were told that it was unfeminine to demand the right to vote or to attend university. Today’s feminists are told by the likes of Hope Not Hate that it is right-wing not to welcome men in dresses into women’s changing rooms, prisons and hospital wards. Unfeminine, unnatural, right-wing… the language changes but the sentiment remains the same. Women who demand sex-based rights should apparently just shut up and defer to men.