On Sunday, Brighton definitively showed Kellie Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) she’s still not welcome here!

In a glorious colourful display of solidarity, a community mobilisation of 150-200 trans people, trans allies and people who just don’t like far-right grifters speaking in their town centre completely surrounded the meagre crowd of 50 who had assembled to listen to her bigotry. Brighton Antifascists and Trans Liberation Front Brighton collaborated together at very short notice to pull off an example of mass community mobilisation at its best, seeing an active and empowered crowd spontaneously working together to a run the haters out of town.

Kellie Jay Keen is Britain’s most extreme and notorious transphobe. In classic right-wing grifter mode, she’s tried to build an online career on shock tactics and outrage. But she is more than just an anti-trans bigot. She represents the cross over from the ‘Gender Critical’ movement, which theoretically thinks of itself as feminist, into the proper far-right. She has declared herself “not a feminist” and put huge time and effort into building links with the American Christian Nationalist right and dipping her hand into its deep pockets. She has been funded by the CPAC conference which has openly called for the “elimination” of trans people. The American ‘conservatives’ of the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance for Defending Freedom (classified as a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Centre) love her transphobia and want to use it as the wedge to further their wider agenda of rolling back abortion access, ending gay marriage and even restricting access to contraception, all of which Keen has happily nodded along with. So we have the bizarre spectacle of her followers, who presumably still think of themselves as feminists, happily helping make the Handmaids Tale a real thing because hating trans people has become so important for them it outweighs all else. Keen has become so extreme that she has even been denounced by other TERF groups such as Women’s Place UK.

Keen has long attracted support from the far-right, and has herself praised Tommy Robinson. In her ongoing efforts to ingratiate herself with racists she has expressed support for Zionism, denigrated Palestinians and posted anti-Muslim hate. Supporting Zionism hasn’t stopped her also managing to get pally with anti-semites and neo-Nazis however. She has been hosted by white nationalist livestreamers, a speaker at one of her rallies quoted Mein Kampf favourably and in Australia she even attracted an ‘honour guard’ of sieg-heiling neo-Nazis with a banner saying “Destroy Paedo Freaks”. Nice people.

Her rallies in Britain have also sometimes attracted attendance from some proper far-right nasties. However, this time out her shrunken crowd seemed to consist almost entirely of older women and some men, more of the “had my brain melted on Facebook and now I’m Graham Linehan” variety rather than violent goons. However standing up to hatemongers is vital whether they are waving a Stella and an England flag or doddering around holding a “TERF island” (yes really!) banner. The insane explosion of anti-trans hate we have seen in the last few years in this country, quite apart from the huge damage it does on its own, has become simultaneously one of the major gateway drugs and recruiting tools of the contemporary far-right and also an increasingly mainstream political position. From Putin in Russia to Trump in America and on to our own lovable and late lamented Tory Party, dunking on trans people has become flavour du jour as part of any aspiring nationalist’s platform.

Keen last came to Brighton in 2022, when roughly equal numbers confronted each other in a messy demo and counter demo which saw some of her supporters arrested for violent assault. Nevertheless, she was able to try and paint this as a success. This time round it’s going to be a lot harder for her to represent this as a victory. By using the cunning ruse of walking around the edges of the police line we completely surrounded her crowd. She was totally drowned out by our chants, sirens and pots and pans, so that you couldn’t hear anything on her livestream of the demo. Very notably our crowd contained people of all ages and had all the energy and humour. Her crowd were tired, old and quiet – straining to listen to the inaudible speeches. Passersby were leafletted and informed of what was going on and what the real politics of ‘Let Women Speak’ are all about to almost universally supportive reactions. After a mere hour of trying to lipread bigotry, they called it a day and packed up an hour earlier than planned. Kellie Jay showed the extent of her loyalty to her fans as she abandoned them, piled into a Range Rover with her private security goons and zoomed off at high speed.

As ‘Nazi Barbie’ vanished into the sunset, her beleaguered supporters had to trudge on foot through Brighton’s busy streets pursued by an impromptu Pride parade chanting “train station’s that way!” This march of shame through the town centre resulted in a surreal coda to the days’ events, as a group of Posie supporters being escorted out of town by the heckling crowd chose to duck into the North Laine Bazaar on Upper Gardener St, which they then refused to leave. A stalemate ensued as the crowd sat down in the road outside chanting “Fuck off – Go home”. The owner of the flea market came out to tell us she was on our side and had asked the police to remove them but they were refusing to leave the shop. Someone in our crowd presented the shop owner with a bunch of flowers and she came and joined our demo to a huge round of applause! In the end three vanloads of cops had to arrive in order to load 5 or 6 Posie fans into the back and drive them off.

Meanwhile in a parallel street, another small group of Posie fans ended up in the middle of a street party. One of them bizarrely decided this was the perfect moment to whip out his Israel flag, which he promptly had confiscated. In the ensuing confusion he also managed to lose his flip-flops and thus presumably had to go home barefoot. The gentleman’s flip-flops are now in the possession of demonstrators and will be donated to an appropriate museum as a valued artefact.

After all this will Kellie and her merry band of bigots be rushing to come back to Brighton? Let’s hope not. But if they do we’ll be ready.

A big thank you to everyone who helped organise the day and to everyone who turned out and helped make it what it was! ❤️ 🖤

For more in depth unpleasant background information see: posieisafascist.com , Hope not Hate Kellie Jay Keen Case File , Pink News profile and The National profile