Souped Woman Sued By Soup Co.
The soup just keeps coming for Posie Parker aka Kellie-Jay Keen aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
I try very hard to pretend, in my day to day life, that the Daily Mail does not exist. If you aren’t familiar, you lucky dog, the Daily Mail is Britain’s most scandalous rag. They’re infamous for decades of journalistic malpractice, unreliable reporting, and sensationalized headlines. In the past few years alone, the Mail has paid substantial damages after outing the complainant of a sexual assault case, paid substantial damages for publishing false and derogatory information about a Muslim couple, and paid substantial damages for spuriously slandering a UK-based charity as a terrorist organization.
There are Republican politicians in America who sling less mud than the Mail!
But to everybody’s detriment, today I must acknowledge the existence of the Mail because they’re the only outlet reporting on my favorite English grifter’s most recent difficulties. Notorious anti-transgender activist Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull, who sometimes operates under the pseudonym Posie Parker, is being sued for copyright infringement by the Campbell Soup Company.
The best part? She insists she won’t back down.
What wonderful news! I love seeing bigots crushed under the weight of their own incompetence… even if it means I have to root for a major corporation.
If you’re unfamiliar with Keen’s work, it’s kind of a lot to get into, but here are the highlights:
Keen is an anti-transgender activist, and the founder of anti-transgender activist group Standing for Women, who first rose to prominence in 2018 when she paid eight hundred pounds to have a very goofy sign erected in Liverpool. The sign, which defined women as “adult human [females],” was later taken down after being correctly recognized as roundabout hate speech.
Keen and her buddies like to parrot this definition of women as “adult human females” at transgender women like me, even though I would absolutely describe myself as all three of those things!
Since then, Keen has been a very consistent source of public outrage across the UK. In 2018, anti-trans activist group Woman’s Place UK publicly severed ties with Keen over a series of racist, Islamophobic remarks she made on Twitter; in 2019, Keen flew all the way to America to publicly harass then Human Rights Campaign national press secretary, now a Delaware state senator, Sarah McBride. She regularly welcomes Neo-Nazis at her public speaking events; and she wants armed men to patrol women’s bathrooms to keep the icky transes out.
She’s kind of a lot… and I haven’t even mentioned her weird Nazi Barbie profile picture!
So! On to more current news.
Back in March, at an Auckland rally, some intrepid hero dumped a can of tomato soup on Keen’s bottle blond mop. Not unlike the classic milkshaking of Andy Ngo, Keen immediately spun this weak ass adult food fight as one of the most harrowing moments of her life. She feared for her health, apparently, saying afterwards that she thought her children were going to “lose their mother.”
It’s hard to imagine an assault more terrifying and dangerous than a few ounces of tomato sauce to the wig. I hope somebody can get this poor, beleaguered woman a medal.
Following The Soupening, Keen started selling some new products in her online store, which must mean she’s found a new company to work with since the last one dropped her like she’s radioactive! Good for her, really. The business of grinding innocent minorities under heel should never be unprofitable.
But apparently a few of her latest store additions caught the ire of Campbell’s! In addition to several soup-related kitschy knick knacks, Keen’s most damning violation of intellectual property is a “Posie’s Courageous Tomato Soup” mug that was clearly designed to resemble a classic can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
Keen has defended the decision by insisting that she was inspired by Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, which—and I should point out I am not a lawyer or an expert on intellectual property law—does not sound like any kind of defense at all, to me.
Keen insists she will not be moved by Campbell’s seemingly legitimate claim of copyright violation, and I for one support her in this. I think she should dig her heels in and refuse to budge even an inch, no matter how they threaten her, no matter how much money it costs her, no matter how much it ruins her life!
Her friends like to quote Hitler, and she has said before that she intends to “annihilate” any woman who stands in the way of her bigotry. She’s repeatedly touted the idea of entering into politics as an independent candidate, and I’d say it’s pretty clear that this would be a disaster for the world at large. Most sane people would be thrilled at the prospect of pretty much anything nipping those political ambitions in the bud.
So here’s hoping, against all the odds, the UK’s most pernicious and vile transphobe finally gets taken out by… uh… a soup company’s IP lawyers.