British Activist Against Transgenderism Tours US: ‘Land of Free Speech’ Doesn’t Feel Free

Kellie-Jay Keen protests against gender transitioning children in San Francisco, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va.—British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen is touring the United States to raise more awareness that gender transition is “mutilating children’s bodies” and “the sterilization of those children.” At the same time, she didn’t feel that the United States was so free.

“I want people to be fully knowledgeable about what [gender transition] is that they’re consenting to and promoting. And at the moment, I just simply don’t think they do,” she told The Epoch Times. She said left-wing media propagated that gender-transitioning children was a “lovely, kind gesture,” and it was not.

“A lot of people have no idea what’s happening here,” she said, explaining the objective of her “Let Women Speak” tour in America. “Ultimately, if I change that, if they understand what’s happening, I think they will object. And I think it will stop.”

Kellie-Jay Keen (2nd L) at a rally in front of the Loudoun County Government Center in Leesburg, Va., on Nov 3. 2022. Courtesy of Suzanne Satterfield

‘Land of Free Speech’ Doesn’t Feel Free

Keen arrived in the United States in mid-October and had visited several major cities on the West Coast and in middle America before the two rally stops in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in northern Virginia on Nov. 3. She said she wanted women to be able to speak in the actual public square because they couldn’t do so freely on social media. She is also making a documentary about her U.S. tour to encourage more women to join the conversation.

“This is the land of free speech, and I just don’t feel it when I’m here,” she said of her experience in the United States. “It doesn’t feel like you have very solid First Amendment rights.”

According to Keen, her Portland rally, initially scheduled for Oct. 25, had to cancel due to death threats. On Oct. 26, she ended her women’s rights rally early in Tacoma, Washington. A middle-aged lesbian was injured in the arm. In Austin, on Oct. 29, a group of men tried to shut down her event. She said she and her supporters were circled by a transgender rights group shouting obscenities. And on Oct. 30, the police arrived to protect her group in Chicago.

She said whether the East Coast would be different remained to be seen.

Keen founded Standing for Women, a women’s rights group, in 2018. She said she decided to be vocal against gender transition because it had challenged her bottom line. “Cutting the breasts of 13-year-old girls! If people aren’t motivated to come out and speak out against that, I really don’t know what it will take,” she added.

She has four children—a daughter at 16 and three sons at 20, 19, and 14. “We bore our children; we heard their first words; we gave them their first cuddles,” she said. “And now we are going to protect them from this cancer that is transgenderism. That is the erasure of their sexual boundaries. That is just mass grooming.”

Her next stops will be in Miami, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York before returning to the UK in mid-November.

Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, a British activist against sterilization of children through gender transition, speaks at a rally outside a Fairfax County School Board meeting in Falls Church, Va., on Nov. 3, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

Parental Rights and Midterms

The two rallies at the Loudoun and Fairfax counties in northern Virginia a week before the midterms thrust Keen into the center of parental rights issues.

In both Fairfax and Loudoun counties, schools can assist children’s gender transitioning without informing parents. In September, Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin introduced a new transgender student policy requiring schools to obtain parents’ written requests to use preferred pronouns or assist with social and medical transition for students.

And the new guidelines require students to use bathrooms according to sex at birth. Facing much pressure from trans rights groups, the policy’s public comment period was extended 30 days until the end of November.

“We have a thing in the UK called loco parentis [“in the place of a parent”], which is the school is kind of considered your parent when the parents aren’t there. I think it’s gone a little bit too far now, where I think the school thinks they are the parents,” said Keen. “And actually, they remain the parents even when the children go home. I want my children to be looked after at school; I don’t want them to be ideologically captured.”

“Right now, you need to show the Democrats a big fat lesson that [promoting gender transition] is not okay. And then you can punish the Republicans if you want the next time around if they don’t do a great job,” she told the attendees at a rally outside a Fairfax County School Board meeting in Falls Church on Nov. 3.

Republican Congressional candidate Jim Myles (L) joins a rally outside the Fairfax County School Board meeting in Falls Church, Va., on Nov. 3, 2022. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

Difference Between UK and US

On Oct. 20, England’s National Health Service (NHS) announced new gender dysphoria service guidelines for children and young people. Under the new guidelines, doctors will no longer encourage preferred pronouns or “social transitioning”—being treated as the opposite sex in social settings without medical interventions—to gender-curious children. In July, NHS announced the closure of the country’s only children’s gender identity clinic. It would be replaced by two regional hubs and a more “holistic” approach with mental health support.

The new policy (pdf) in October cited the Cass Report that social transition might have “significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning.” The Report was the result of a review by Dr. Hilary Cass, a British pediatrician and past president of the Royal College of Pediatrics.

Keen said the key was “nobody financially gains from the outcome of the Cass Report” in England. “In the United States, many people financially gain from pretending that they think it’s a good idea to transition children. So, they skew their results. They put biases in their actual hypothesis,” she said. “It really is no surprise when an industry makes billions from transitioning children that they would find reports to support such an idea.”

In addition, the UK’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 also makes the exception that aristocrats cannot inherit title or property based on gender. “So we already know the elite people in our country, right from the get-go, knew that men really couldn’t be women. Otherwise, you know, you'd have women transitioning into the inheritance,” she said.