Well, here we are again, another chilly Sunday and another ‘Let Women Speak’ event menaced by TRAs. This time they brought along foghorns, megaphones and an amplifier, and I’d like to address that first of all. There’s a bylaw in the Royal Parks which states that amplification is not allowed. It makes sense really. On a busy day at Speaker’s Corner it would be impossible to hear a thing if all the speakers were amplified. Everyone else would just be immersed in a huge nonsensical cacophony of sound. Welcome to my Sunday afternoon, which was just that.

In yet another classic example of the ‘do whatever you want, all the time’ philosophy, the police made no attempt to stop the amplification. I spoke to one officer who said something about how on this occasion they were going to respect the TRAs ‘human right’ to express themselves. And express themselves they did – I expect they’d be glad to know my ears are still ringing.

Why are my ears ringing? Because, for much of the time, I was one of the women trying to ensure the TRAs didn’t move in and kettle us in an even smaller space. The police insisted they’d got it, but a few of us stood in the bigger gaps so the women listening to the speakers could- theoretically-feel safer. Another women who had positioned herself to stop the TRAs moving closer was using a walking aid with a seat. She faced a group holding a tarpaulin with ‘TERFs off our turf- defend trans lives’ sprayed on it in black paint. A kid in a beanie and a mask, probably young enough to be her grandchild, held up a piece of cardboard in front of her. It said ‘Fuck Fascists‘. I looked over to my right. A TRA was screaming something about being on the right side of history.

It was a damp afternoon, with brief half-hearted burst of sunshine and an on-and-off drizzle. As such, I faced a row of pointy rainbow umbrellas, less than a foot away from what Julia Long once referred to as ‘the baying mob that wants us dead’.

The TRAs held signs up above their umbrellas. Sometimes they hid behind them and at others they popped up to shout abuse over the top. Most of them wore face masks. A megaphone was just a foot from my face at one point and I could see an amp on the ground nearby. The guys at the front were tall and volatile. Think I’m exaggerating? Check out some of the clips I and others have shared on Twitter.

When I thought to do so, I counted about a dozen officers inside the perimeter. I couldn’t see outside but I’m told there were about half a dozen more.

Torn between my own distrust of the police and wishing there were more of them, I looked around, trying to measure out in my head how much space we had, using the ‘one tall man lying down= 6ft’ method. I reckoned our cut-off circle was about 18ft across. There were about a hundred people, mostly women, inside the circle, and about a hundred TRAs outside.

“We’re enclosed in a really small space,” I said to one officer. “They shouldn’t have been allowed to push us so close together.” He told me there weren’t enough officers present to protect a larger circle. I asked ‘Why not?’. Hadn’t they seen what had happened in New Zealand? He nodded, but to be honest I’m not sure he’d even heard what I said. Remember, we were surrounded by five score screaming lunatics. He didn’t have an answer but at least he was willing to speak to me. At least two of the officers seemed to be employing a ‘don’t engage at all’ policy.

 

“Scratch a TERF a fascist bleeds!” chant the TRAs.

We’ve had a lot of meetings in Hyde Park over the last few years. I’d like to know when any woman has stood up and said anything fascistic? Because I’ve been to many, if not most, of the meetings, and I’ve never heard anything like that. The TRAs seem genuinely confused with no idea of specifics. They are double-plus good. We are double-plus ungood. We are mean, nasty poopoo heads because we don’t want to play with the gender fairy.  They are sounding foghorns and shouting that we are Nazi scum and that there are more of them than us.

“They’re moving in,” I observed to the policewoman. “If they get much closer it would be really easy for them to rush us.” She ignored me. I made the same observation to another officer, “Oh no they’re not,” he said, in a perky and reassuring tone. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen. We’re here to protect everyone.”

I wasn’t sure I shared his confidence, faced as I was with over a hundred angry protestors, but to give him his due, it didn’t kick off.

“How many more queer kids must die?” chanted a woman into a megaphone. “Family values are a lie!” screamed the guy behind her, who must have had a really shit childhood.

Wait though… what… whose family? Which values? That’s a lot of assumptions right there.

The guy with the blue wing-eyeliner continued screaming, “family values are a lie!” in a rough, gravelly and yet somehow high-pitched voice. I didn’t know whether to feel more sorry for him or his mum.

Shortly afterwards, a woman started shouting about abortion rights. I was genuinely confused for a moment. Did she honestly believe that as a group we were against abortion rights?  Someone shouted ‘gay rights are human rights’. Don’t they realise that about half the people they are kettling are LGB? One person, their head entirely covered, was holding a sign reading ‘Gender is stewpid anyway’. Yes. So it is. So what the fuck is all this about?

It’s insane. They literally have no idea what they are protesting about. They think they’re shouting at a group of women who want to exploit the poor, deny abortion rights, torture children, kick puppies and force everyone to be straight and boring. It is absolute fucking madness. And why are their signs so stewpid and hyperbolic?

TERFS FUCK OFF

FUCK FASCISTS

FASCISTS FUCK OFF

FUCK OFF FASCISTS

Posie Parker? More like park your TERF arse elsewhere

Every trans suicide is a preventable murder

Gender is stewpid anyway

You can resist we’ll still exist

Your bigotry kills kids

Trans lives matter more than fascist feelings

“Why don’t you just kill yourselves?” yells one. A few of them take it up, giggling at their own bravado.

“Why don’t you just kill yourselves? Why don’t you just kill yourselves?”

But I digress. Where was I? Ah, yes, the amplification. Totally against the rules of the Royal Parks, for reasons we’ve already noted. I remember a year ago- two years ago?- when Posie (or possibly another woman) brought along an amplifier we were told in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t allowed.

The policeman- who seemed like a reasonable bloke, just trying to do his job yada yada- told me it had been decided by ‘command structure’ that it was the protestors ‘human right’ to use a megaphone to protest, despite the bylaw forbidding it. I asked if the bylaw was meaningless in that case, we all had human rights, so was anybody allowed to break it? No, he replied, the excemption was only for the purposes of this event.

“So are you saying his human right to use a megaphone overrules the law?” I asked.

“A minor infringement of a bylaw, yes. In order for the protest to take place.”

“Nazi scum! Nazi Scuuuuuuuuuum!” screamed the guy in front of us.

A foghorn went off by my left ear.

The officer told me the police’s role was to “make sure the event goes off without any physical altercation and everyone has the opportunity to protest peacefully.”

“Nazi Scum!” screamed the guy in front of us, banging his drum in a frenzy. “NAZI SCUM! NAZI SCUUUUUMMMMM!”

It was LOUD. So loud that now, over 5 hours after I was standing near the megaphone in Hyde Park, my ears are still ringing as if I’d just left a really loud gig. The police officer standing next to me at one point didn’t even have the luxury of moving around. She just had to stand there while they yelled “Why don’t you fucking kill yourselves?” at us and “All coppers are bastards” at her.

Freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest are vital in a civilised society. Yelling in peoples faces, making loud noises in their ears, screaming at them to kill themselves & calling them Nazis is neither free speech nor peaceful protest. It’s bullying & intimidation, and guys, wake up, you are not on the right side of history if you behave like this, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

“Nazi scum,” they shout. “Kill yourself! TERFS kill kids!

You can’t hide! You’ve got fascists on your side!”

 

Women Spoke Anyway

Despite the frenzied noise, women did speak. I couldn’t hear any of them, but there are several links below to videos of the afternoon.

Alf up a Tree has made a great thread of YouTube videos of the speakers which you can follow on his channel, or via this thread on Twitter.

You can watch  Aja’s ‘gender junkies’ clip here and her recording of women singing here.

Mr Menno posted a video thread of his experience at Speakers Corner and how TRAs followed him and his friends afterwards.

Julia Hartley Brewer discusses the afternoon in Hyde Park, in a recording shared on Twitter by Venice, here.

Journalist Subject Access who ‘endeavour(s) to cover as many news stories as possible that the Mainstream Media refuse to report on’ recorded his experience here.

“I’ve been at Speakers Corner for 35 years. Speakers Corner is about the right to free speech. That’s not free speech. That’s the destruction of free speech.”

“The feminists are being labelled as Nazis for stating mere scientific facts,” observes Muslim YouTuber Ali Dawar in his video.

Referring to the TRAs, who pushed him, swore at him and poked him with umbrellas, he observes,“these guys are violent thugs… they’re a religion, a very violent religion.”

#LetWomenSpeak

It was two thirty in the morning when I suddenly had an idea for a new flag. ‘It won’t take that long to make,’ I told myself, ‘and I can take it with me in the morning. I can easily design and make it in half an hour! I mean, I’ve never made a flag from scratch in half an hour before, but why should that be an problem? What could possibly go wrong?’

Nearly an hour later, I gave up. I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of the particular mistakes I made, but they were both idiotic and spectacular. Bits of miscut and mismeasured vinyl covered the floor. All I had made was a mess. Eventually I abandoned the idea and went to bed.

Because of the flag failure, I forgot to check my route on my phone before I fell asleep, and slept late.  Because I didn’t check my phone, I didn’t know that my local station was closed for ‘essential engineering works’, or that two bus stops closest to my house were also closed. “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,” as my old gran used to say.

As a result, I didn’t arrive at the Reformers Tree until about 12.20, when everything was already in full flow. A large group of masked men were screaming ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we will not live in fear.’

They sounded very male and not in the least bit scared.

Some mostly female voices echoed the chant.  It usually seems to be the men leading the chants. Of course, testosterone lowers the female voice- oestrogen seems less effective at changing the male voice- so it’s always possible… oh, who am I kidding?

It woz the menz.

Let Women Speak is not allowed to use amplifiers or megaphones, nor are those close by at Speakers Corner. This is a rule of the Royal Parks, but hey, the rules don’t apply to the pronoun posse. They were using foghorns and megaphones right in front of the police, who were busy choosing their battles and did nothing to stop them. Do whatever you want, all the time.

I thought the police did a fair job on this occasion. It isn’t easy keeping a lunch mob at bay. No, that’s not a typo. Some of them had come with tupperware lunchboxes to use as makeshift maraccas. They waved them at us and rattled them angrily. Others had painted mis-spelled slogans on pieces of cardboard.

It was all a bit Blue Peter on crack.

I understand, of course, that the police need to balance the right to assembly with the right to protest and are supposed to be impartial. It is not their job to take sides, although Stonewall would have them believe otherwise. What is often overlooked in talk of ‘sides’ is that we are a group of women who meet once a month, in a park, to discuss our sex-based rights. We have done nothing wrong. We are not forcing anybody to listen to what we have to say. We are women of all classes and colours; ages and experiences. We are not courting conflict. We have a right to meet. No, we are not ‘asking for it’.

A larger police presence might have been a good idea under the circumstances. If there hadn’t been over a dozen  Let Women Speak stewards present it could have turned really nasty.

And, yes, there are certainly plenty of other things the police should be doing in a city the size of London. However, many of us remember how many cops were sent to remove a lesbian peacefully sitting on a chair eating pizza at a ticketed event a few years ago. Evidently her presence made certain attendees feel ‘unsafe’. Astonishingly, a masked and gloved 6ft tall bloke screaming at you that you’re a murderer has a similar effect.

The TRAs move in. They form a semi-circle around us. The stewards form a vanguard to protect the women trying to speak. For some of the women it is their first time at Reformers Tree. The TRAs shout abuse at us. They shout that these are their streets and we are not welcome. They laugh at those who are estranged from their children. They shout at us that we are fascists, that we are hateful, that we should die, that we cause the deaths of children with our words. They claim that we have blood on our hands. Occasionally, a few of us will shout back.

It is hardly a level playing field.The police seemed less snarky this time. Perhaps they are starting to notice that the women really do just want to talk about their rights and the TRAs are actually completely barking mad, thrill-seeking troublemakers with very little imagination? Perhaps.

I have a friend whose son is in the Mets and he recently rang her up, horrified, saying “Mum, did you know they put a rapist in a women’s prison, and did you know what’s happening to women’s sports and changing rooms?”

So I am holding out a little hope for the Mets: maybe they will see past the rainbow lanyards and ‘progress’ police cars and start taking reality a little more seriously when it comes to transactivists.

I approached a group of women gathered to the left of the TRAs.

“Is anyone speaking yet?” I asked.

“No, it’s so loud, and it all looks a bit volatile. Nothing yet.”

There was a short scuffle as TRAs tried to move closer and the police and a line of Let Women Speak stewards held them at bay.

“Move back!” commanded one of the cops.

“No, you move back!” retorted a young woman petulantly. I half expected her to stamp her foot and stick her tongue out like a stroppy toddler.

It is true that there’s an age disparity between your average TRA and the women who attend the Reformers Tree.  They laugh and say we’ll all be dead soon. Sometimes they like to wear T shirts emblazoned with the legend ‘Kill TERFs’, just in case we hadn’t got the message.

We call them the ‘black pampers’ and mock their naivity. It’s easy to joke about them being young- I do it all the time. But they aren’t harmless and most of them aren’t even really that young. The ones doing the yelling, the ones who look at us like they really would like to beat us up; they are adults and they are dangerous. Dismissing or exculpating their behaviour is a mistake.

Most of them are physically stronger than most of us- yes, I know there are exceptions- and they are shouting and holding signs saying we should die. The most aggressive ones, young or not, just want a ruck and ‘Mark my words,’ as my old gran used to say, ‘sooner or later somebody’s going to get hurt’.

They shouted, ‘TERFs kill kids! TERFs kill kids!’ at us. So that’s nice. One of them was even holding a piece of cardboard with ‘LET TRANS KIDS LIVE’ written on it. Madness. A lot of them, it seems, really, genuinely believe that we are evil fascists who want trans kids to die. None of them have ever listened to what we have to say.

Most seem to deem older women especially worthy of contempt. One of their chants was “Why are you all over forty?” another is “You’re only here because your kids won’t call you back”.

Which, I have to say, says as lot more about their family relationships than it does about ours.

It isn’t true, of course, that we are all over forty, although many of us are. More and more younger women are joining the movement to protect sex-based rights. And nestling in their own ranks, chanting with the TRAs this Sunday in fact, is somebody well over forty – Sarah Jane Barker who “spent 30 years in prison for attempting to murder another prisoner, after being imprisoned for kidnapping and torturing her (sic) stepmother’s brother, and has since thrown herself (sic)  into local causes” according to the Southwark News.

I was starting to wonder if we would get hemmed in, but we always had free movement. I wanted to  move out of the circle and take another photograph from further away, or even stand up on a nearby bin to get a decent overhead shot, but reader, I confess, I was afraid to do either of those things. The bin I considered standing on was on the opposite side to most of the TRAs but a small group of people in black stood close by. I overheard one policeman say “Keep an eye on that lot” to another, and the woman next to me informed me that one of them was the man who’d thrown water over Kellie-Jay two months ago.

I’d heard that he’d been banned from the park: I presume that isn’t true or surely the police would have prevented him from lurking so close by with his masked buddies…

I moved away from the ‘front line’ to see if the speeches had started yet. They had.  Julia Long was speaking. When I went back a little later, a woman in a sufragette scarf, sitting in a wheelchair, was talking. I couldn’t get close enough to hear what she was saying over the noise of yelling, drums, whistles and megaphones. Kellie Jay was next to her with the camera. Women and some men stood around in a circle, trying to listen. You can listen to the recording of the livestream here.

It was hard to hear much over the noise and chanting.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

“TERFS kill kids”

“Posie Parker’s a fascist”

and what has to be my absolute all time favourite, “Whose genitals? Our genitals!”

“Who protects the fascists?” they chanted at the cops. “You protect the fascists!”

“Who protects the rapists?” chanted back a group of women to the TRAs. “You protect the rapists!”

“Trans rights and women’s rights are part of the same fight!” called out a young woman. Others began to echo it.

Some of their crowd, mostly younger ones, looked less certain, hanging back, not  joining in with the chanting and name-calling. I’m sure seeing a group of peaceful women surrounded by screaming masked men made many wonder if they really were on the right side of history.

The meeting was nearly over, so I wandered around for a last look at the signs.

In a brief gap in the chanting and general noise making, I found myself face to face with a young lad.

“They aren’t part of the same fight at all,” I said to him. “You know they put a rapist in a women’s prison? Because of his gender identity?”

“No they didn’t,” he scoffed.

“Really. It’s happened more than once.”

He laughed and said, “Yeah, right, in the fascist papers you read.”

“You should read more broadly. Google it,” I told him, “You’ll see.”

But I doubt he will.

We left, mostly in a couple of larger groups. The police made sure we had left the area before allowing most the TRAs to leave. As we walked alongside the park to the pub we saw one of the TRAs on a bike, talking on his phone.

I felt uneasy. I decided to stay with the others a bit longer and not take the underpass back towards the station by myself.