FFS Friday: Moira Deeming MP
December 13, 2024
FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription.
Today’s FFS Friday honors Moira Deeming, a member of the Victorian Legislative Council of the Parliament of Victoria in Australia. Deeming has just won her legal case against Victoria’s opposition leader, John Pesutto. Pesutto had called her a Nazi after she attended a rally called “Let Women Speak.”
Those of us in this fight to restore parental rights, sex-based rights, for women and safeguards for children, we are in every political party, we are in every workplace, every union, every family. We will never run out of energy, we will never be crushed, and we are going to survive whatever it is that you want to throw at us - and then we will win.
- Moira Deeming
In March 2023, UK-based women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen organized a series of rallies in Australia and New Zealand under the banner “Let Women Speak.” Keen and Deeming, among countless women globally, are known for fighting for the sex-based rights of women and girls. They state openly and accurately that a woman is an adult human female.
One such rally was scheduled for the Victorian Parliament building in Melbourne. Deeming, then a member of the Liberal Party, attended. The rally was crashed by a group of neo-Nazis, who performed the Sieg Heil salute on the front steps of Parliament.
Shortly thereafter, Pesutto moved to expel her from the party and made a series of defamatory comments in press releases and interviews. For example, he claimed that Deeming had “associations” with people who had “known links with Nazis.” She was eventually expelled and vowed to take legal action.
In December of last year, she filed suit, alleging five counts of defamation. According to The Guardian:
In court documents, Deeming’s lawyers have drawn on a 15-page document that Pesutto’s office had circulated to Liberal MPs and the media when he moved to expel Deeming from the party room, and argued his comments conveyed a number of imputations, including that the MP supports and sympathises with white supremacists and neo-Nazis and that she is a white supremacist or neo-Nazi.
Pesutto was also sued by Keen and Australian feminist Angie Jones (both of whom were at the rally), who alleged that he defamed them to justify his efforts to expel Deeming from the party by suggesting they were associated with far-right extremists, including neo-Nazis. Those actions settled and he issued a public apology.
No evidence has ever been produced to even suggest that Deeming, Keen, or Jones was connected in any way with the neo-Nazis who crashed the rally.
In a scathing ruling, the judge found that Pesutto had defamed Deeming on all five allegations and ordered him to pay her $300,000 in non-economic losses (another hearing will be scheduled to decide legal costs).
During a press conference after the judgment was announced, she said that her fight for sex-based rights would continue. She said, “Those of us in this fight to restore parental rights, sex-based rights, for women and safeguards for children, we are in every political party, we are in every workplace, every union, every family. We will never run out of energy, we will never be crushed, and we are going to survive whatever it is that you want to throw at us - and then we will win.”
Moira, if you are reading this, thank you for standing up for women and girls as a sex class. Thank you for taking on the bullies and the name-callers. Thank you for not backing down. Today’s FFS Friday is for you.
The Australian media is routinely referring to KJK as the ‘anti-trans campaigner’ and the LWS event as an anti trans rally, though they now concede it was gatecrashed.
This is a great victory for Moira but there’s still so far to go
If of interest, the opinion of the court in Deeming v. Pesutto is online here: https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2024/2024fca1430
I’ve only skimmed the surface, but even from that, it is extraordinarily detailed. This judge definitely did his homework and displayed, along with his judicial chops, ordinary common sense. Just one example:
“684 At all relevant times, including when he gave approval to release the EMD to the media, Mr Pesutto had before him, or available to him, evidence or material that a reasonable person would understand to make it readily apparent, contrary to Mr Pesutto’s claims on the day of his media “blitz” (20 March), that neither Ms Keen nor Ms Jones were Nazis, Nazi sympathisers, neo-Nazis or anything of the sort; that they in fact staunchly opposed such people and views; and that Ms Keen’s “association” with right-wing extremists and the like was an association only in the sense that she had agreed to be, and was, interviewed by individuals (like Mr Gariépy and Ms Soco from Soldiers of Christ).
“685 Mr Pesutto claimed that he had read the whole of the Pink News article, although whether he did, or did not, is not necessary to decide. Anyone who read the whole of it could only conclude, on the face of the article, that far from sharing the views of right-wing extremists, Ms Keen vehemently opposed them.”
Meanwhile, a California high school caved to a student uprising after hundreds of students showed up wearing T-shirts that read "Save Girls' Sports" to protest a trans athlete on the cross-country team, defying the school's latest dress code. [the T-shirt logos had been compared to swastikas] The school had previously put students in detention for wearing the shirts. But . . . the school did not dress-code students when they showed up wearing the shirts on Wednesday.
To quote Kara: “if we can be heard, we will win.”