‘Silenced in the Name of Wokeness’: Growing Support for Embattled Liberal Candidate Katherine Deves

Biological-sex campaigner Katherine Deves has been selected as the Liberal candidate for Warringah on April 5, 2022 in Sydney, Australia. Katherine Deves/ Facebook

Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, who has faced backlash in the past two weeks for her vocal advocacy against the transgender ideology, has garnered endorsements from some Liberal parliamentarians.

It comes after NSW Treasurer MP Matt Kean and Independent MP Zali Steggall, the latter being Deves’ rival for the seat of Warringah, called for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to disendorse her for the federal election in May over her past comments on the controversial topic.

Mounting scrutiny during the first week of the election campaign saw Deves shut down her social media and apologise for having called Wear it Purple Day, an annual LGBT+ day for young people, a “grooming tactic” that pushed for “extreme body modification.”

In one of her deleted tweets in May, 2021, Deves wrote: “They will not stand for seeing vulnerable children surgically mutilated and sterilised,” and attached a photo of a teenager who had undergone top surgery.

Kean, who is part of the Liberal’s moderate faction, told RN Breakfast on April 19, he did not believe Deves would be “fit for office” and denounced some of her posts as “outright bigotry.” He argued: “We live in a cosmopolitan, multicultural society where people are free to be themselves and that’s a fundamental tenet of liberalism.”

But NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet on April 20 backed Deves’ position as he believed “girls should play sport against girls and women should play sport against women.”

“But ultimately, as well, we in public as politicians, in the media, have an obligation in these areas of debate to participate in a way that is sensitive, particularly in areas that are incredibly delicate, and there are strong views on either side of the debate,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Mark Latham, leader of the right-leaning One Nation NSW branch, on April 19 alleged that the media and Kean “are not raising those comments in their attempt to rub her out as a Liberal candidate.”

“Their agenda is the promotion of transgender,” he wrote on his Facebook post. “This is a worrying time for our society, with the woke brigade determined to make gender as fluid as running tap water.”

While Latham did not support Deves’ past criticism about men, he noted she was right in speaking up about trans-identified men “eroding the hard-fought-for rights of women, especially in girls’ sport.”

“Good on her for this commonsense view.”

New South Wales One Nation Leader Mark Latham at his book launch for 'Outsiders - I won't be silenced' in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 5, 2017. Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

This sentiment is echoed by Northern Territory Country Liberal Party senate candidate Jacinta Price, who warned that Deves was “being silenced in the name of wokeness.”

“If Deves can be silenced then imagine the plight of marginalised women in our nation?” she said in a Facebook post on April 18.

She told Sky News on the same day: “As conservative women, we are constantly under fire and constantly targeted by the left, constantly being gaslit by the left, attempted to be shoved into some kind of box under a label and silenced.”

“And I won’t have that.”

Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the former Warringah member who lost to Independent Zali Steggall at the 2019 election, praised Deves as “a tough, brave person,” adding that he “very much admires her.”

Calls to disendorse Deves have been rejected by Morrison, who asserted he is “not going to allow her to be pushed aside as the pile-on comes in to try and silence her.”

While Liberal Party state MP Felicity Wilson and Senator Anne Ruston have condemned Deves’ past comments, Minister for Women Marise Payne remained silent on the controversy and refused to endorse the controversial Liberal candidate.

In an email to Liberal supporters on April 18, Deeves, a mother-of-three, hit back at her critics, stating she “wasn’t going anywhere.”

“My opponents, parts of the left media and twittersphere have been unrelenting in calling for me to be disendorsed, because of past statements,” her email stated.

“I have been bullied in the most vile way and received death threats. I’m not going anywhere, as the Prime Minister said yesterday.”