Posie Parker’s Hyde Park rally descends into clash between right-wingers and LGBTQ+ activists
A ‘Let Women Speak’ steward was filmed attempting to destroy a banner of pro-LGBTQ+ campaigners. (Twitter/@ICanSeeForever1)
Trans rights campaigners and so-called ‘gender critical’ activists clashed in London’s Hyde Park at an event organised by anti-trans pundit Posie Parker over the weekend.
On Saturday (29 April), hundreds gathered in Hyde Park to attend Parker’s, aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s, latest ‘Let Women Speak’ event.
The gathering also attracted a large number of trans protesters and LGBTQ+ allies, with videos from the event showing a violent clash between the groups, which resulted in a Parker supporter being tackled to the floor by police.
Footage from the demonstration shows the woman forcibly pushing herself into a group of trans allies and attempting to tear a banner, while people attending called for her to “get out” of their space.
Among the attendees were members of far-right campaign group Turning Point UK, who have faced fierce criticism online for portraying the incident as a female steward being “violently attacked by a radical transactivist mob”.
Footage of the incident shows this simply was not the case.
One Twitter user stated: “Total lies as per usual. A GC [gender critical] tried to destroy the property of other protestors and was pulled off by the police.”
Another person commented, sharing footage of the full extent of the incident: “You might see GCs claiming that a steward at the Kellie-Jay Keen rally was attacked by counter-protestors today.
“This is the ‘attack’.”
“Why do they think it’s OK to lie so obviously?,” another user commented.
An attendee of the event, whose tweet was reposted by Posie Parker, noted that the anti-LGBTQ+ protestors were “drowned out by the trans activists”.
On the same weekend, Turning Point UK members joined an array of right-wing figureheads, including GB News host Calvin Robinson, at a protest at the Honor Oak pub in south-east London, where a family-friendly drag event was being held.
At the end of April, hundreds of counter-protestor blocked the far-right activists from disrupting a family-friendly drag event at the same location.
Turning Point UK – an offshoot of an American far-right group closely aligned with former US president Donald Trump – has been condemned by Labour and Lib Dems who highlighted that the organisation “promotes harmful and regressive ideas” about minorities.
Opposition parties have called for the Tory government to cut ties with the right-wing group.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak evaded the question of whether he would condemn the anti-LGBTQ+ organisation during Prime Minister’s Questions on 26 April and instead embarked on a confusing tirade about ‘age-appropriate’ material in classrooms.
PinkNews has contacted Turning Point UK and Posie Parker for comment.
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