Notes on an Ipswich Saturday, in which a widely disliked political activist tried, and largely failed, to play her usual game of “look look I’m being repressed”
~ A Suffolk Anarchists member ~
Their basic shtick is that trans people don’t exist and as they insisted on shouting every five minutes, have genitals (their leader must have opined about blah blah “PENIS” a dozen times, which seemed like an unhealthy degree of obsession). An hour of listening to it made me feel almost sorry for them – it must be a shrivelled, unhappy existence spending your whole life mired in that sort of hatred. It was tedious enough listening to it for 60 minutes, let alone if you’re regularly driving all over the country on a Saturday afternoon specifically to repeat yourself.
But only almost. Because the various women who showed up, a couple being locals, most not, are also being dishonest, constantly, over not just their position on women’s rights (which is about ostracising trans people rather than doing anything positive for women), but also who they’re in league with. In particular, Kellie-Jay/Posie herself.
I don’t think I need to harp on all that much about the politics of Kellie-Jay/Posie, such as they are – she’s got her own page at Hope Not Hate if you’re interested. But just as a general idea, she’s speaking as a guest at Tommy Robinson’s Unite The Kingdom rally next month. You know, the football thug-turned “Christian” hate preacher. She’s a nasty piece of work, driven mainly by narcissism and daily grifting on Youtube (which is the main reason they do these tours round the UK).
Not having the pleasure of her company in town before, but being aware she and her acolytes are big fans of filming everything so they can claim victimhood and harass people afterwards at their homes and jobs, several folk masked up before the demo (inevitably being asked “why are you hiding your faces” by people who know perfectly well why).
Frankly it was barely necessary. The anti-fascist side turned out somewhere around 50 people, stood a few metres away, but they were more than loud enough to drown out most of the bigoted verbiage which was coming from the dozen or so women who were there (backed by a few husbands and sons who were hidden away until late on). They put out a handful of leaflets and did their best to start a fight or two, but bar a couple of squabbles were denied their preferred outrage-farming, so well done to everyone who kept their temper in the face of Kellie-Jay/Posie’s well-honed windups.
The intended audience isn’t really the people of Ipswich though. Kellie-Jay/Posie doesn’t make her scratch off recruiting in county towns and it doesn’t give her that sweet hit of global notoriety she so desperately wants. It’s all just grist to the content mill. And through that lens, today was a failure for her (as well as an embarrassment for her supporters, who continue to undermine their own cause through association and their bizarre, consistent denial about what she is).
The speeches were, when not drowned out entirely, low energy and weary. The usual tired tropes about puberty blockers, sport and prisons. On the other side chants declaring that fascists were unwelcome were kept up throughout. One anti-fascist got a bit shouty, but no real fights were started and ultimately it all felt quite routine. The visitors were just another bunch of losers in a toxic ersatz cult, held together by a campaign to hurt trans people which, by and large, has already been superseded by other, competent political actors without their amateur-hour interventions making the slightest bit of difference.
It’s what they hate the most, that other people aren’t like them.
