Posie Parker said she wanted to ‘speak up for women’. Hundreds of protesters spoke up for trans rights instead, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.
A day of anger and joy
At 11am on Saturday morning the anti-trans activist Posie Parker (real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) was scheduled to speak at the rotunda in Auckland’s Albert Park. By 11.30am she’d been bundled out, having abandoned her plans in the face of a counter-protest led by the city’s rainbow community. As the NZ Herald reported, a barrier erected to try to keep the two factions apart was pushed down, skirmishes broke out between the counter-protest group and Parker’s smaller entourage, and one counter-protester rushed towards Parker and poured a bottle of tomato juice over her head. The events of Saturday morning were tumultuous – but that’s not all they were, wrote Anna Rawhiti-Connell. “To leave people with the impression that the protest was only ugly, angry and chaotic is to assist Parker in feeding the narrative that trans people are people to be feared.” In fact, she wrote, the protest was a “symphony of fearlessness” and a joyful celebration of equality and aroha.
‘The worst place for women I’ve ever visited’
Parker’s own response was vehement. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told Stuff. “What a shameful day for New Zealand.” Later, having abandoned her scheduled Wellington event, she flew out of Auckland and back to the UK. Claiming that police had told her she was lucky to be alive, she tweeted: “I get to leave the worst place for women I’ve ever visited.”
‘I don’t want to give her a platform’
Asked about the weekend’s events on TVNZ’s Q&A, deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni said that while she would not have attended the protest, that didn’t mean she wasn’t strongly opposed to Parker and her beliefs. “In my mind, that woman and her views are abhorrent and actually, in some ways, quite ridiculous,” she told host Jack Tame. “I don’t want to give her a platform, because I think we’re much more progressive and we’ve moved beyond those views mostly in this country.” National’s Erica Stanford said the best way to respond to Parker’s presence would have been to ignore her, and blamed the Green Party for publicising her events. “If she’d come in under the radar, a few people would have turned up, nobody would have known she was here, and she would have gone, and we’d have carried on our tolerant normal ways as we do in New Zealand,” she said.
A proud history of protest in Aotearoa
Saturday morning’s events may have left some people feeling shaken, but it’s worth remembering that’s what an effective protest is designed to do. In a Twitter thread, historian Scott Hamilton drew a direct line between the Springbok tour protests of 1981 and this week’s trans-rights protesters who “felt the morality of their cause” and believed that “the effects of their protest were more important than one person’s freedom to speak in Albert Park. They made the same calculation as the protesters in ’81.” Stuff’s Caroline Williams brought some levity to the matter with her list of the weird things that have been thrown at people during protests in New Zealand, including horse poo (at John Banks), a novelty sex toy (at Steven Joyce) and a wet t-shirt (at the Queen). One outrageous omission: the chocolate and cream lamington thrown at Act’s John Boscawen in 2009, as reported by the NZ Herald with the brilliantly succinct headline ‘Candidate creamed in sponge cake attack’.