Kellie-Jay Keen Says Disgust Reflex Good
Known anti-feminist, anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen (or perhaps Posie Parker?) has come out in support of… “rejecting” things that are “gross”? What does Keen think is gross? And what sort of rejection does she have in mind?
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Kellie-Jay Keen, sometimes known by her nom de guerre Posie Parker, has yet again bleated something any normal person would instantly recognize as horrific and unacceptable. Keen has said and done many despicable things, but suggesting that rejecting “things” because you find them “disgusting” is good may take the cake.
Considering she’s the UK’s most vocal anti-trans activist, it’s not hard to guess who she might feel disgust towards and wish to reject.
If you aren’t familiar with Keen’s work… well, where have you been, doll? Kellie-Jay Keen/Posie Parker is one of the loudest transphobes on TERF Isle, and that’s saying something! She’s done a lot of organizing for anti-trans groups in Britain, stirred up a lot of hate, and cozied up to actual factual Nazis… more than once! Let’s put a pin in that, because it’s going to be extra important later.
Keen has harassed trans women more times than I could possibly count, expressed a fondness for tomato soup, and perhaps most horrifyingly is running for a parliament seat in Bristol. On the bright side, it appears she’s part of a newly created “Party of Women,” and considering the inevitable upcoming Labour sweep, an independent bigot representing a novelty party likely stands a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected to parliament.
Among her greatest works is popularizing the phrase “adult human female” to describe a cisgender woman. The definition, which notably does not in any way exclude me as a trans woman from womanhood, is part of her grifting meal ticket. She plasters it all over apparel and stickers that are sold in her merch website, and must accordingly trot the phrase out as frequently as she possibly can. You know, to increase brand recognition.
Curiously, Keen doesn’t do her anti-trans work as a result of some misguided interpretation of feminism. People frequently call her a TERF, but Keen does not identify as a radical feminist, or in fact any kind of feminist at all. She has said, more than once, that she isn’t a feminist because “feminism has been taken over by pimps, punters, pro men pretending to be women, pro womb rental, [and] anti child morons.”
Insightful stuff.
Unfortunately, we just don’t have the time for me to dig into every hateful, obscene thing Keen has done, or to psychoanalyze her painfully transparent hustle. What I’d love to get into, however, is the disgust reflex inherent in most people and how bigots abuse that reflex to indoctrinate other people into hating already oppressed minorities!
There have been multiple studies correlating heightened disgust reflex and personal prejudice towards LGBTQ+ people (Inbar et al., 2009; Terrizzi et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2019), so we know that some percentage—particularly among the “morality”-focused crowd, i.e., religious or conservative types—take umbrage with queer folks purely because of the ick factor. I don’t particularly appreciate being associated with the same impulse you get when you see bird shit on your windshield, but urges like that are learned, and can be unlearned. Just like we have to teach our children the stove is hot, they learn their biases from us. Humans are not slaves to our biological programming, we’re slaves to our culture, which is much better because with a lot of work we can change it for the better.
The real problem is that hate groups and activists like Keen want to change it for the worse and stoke that disgust reflex. They do this for two reasons: To foment hatred for the people they wish to see eradicated, and to show allegiance to or bond with their in-group. The Nazis named Jews Untermenschen, subhuman, as part of a long program intended to dehumanize us and, thus, legitimize our genocide. It isn’t new, and it isn’t uncommon. Chattel slave owners in America treated Black slaves as property, white murderers posed alongside lynched Black men during the Jim Crow era, American troops took selfies with the corpses of innocent Afghanis they murdered during the Global War on Terror… the list goes on and on and on.
Kellie-Jay Keen is not engaging in any novel form of philosophy or activism. She’s participating in a time old tradition, in which the dominant group speaks to the inhumanity of those they seek to oppress. She may fancy herself a culture warrior, but Keen is nothing more than a bigot.
Time will necessarily vindicate the oppressed, and prove that Keen, like those who came before her, is very much on the wrong side of history.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
