Moira Deeming's Defamation Win: A Troubling Victory for Far-Right Dogwhistles

In Australia, no longer can you accuse someone of being a Nazi sympathiser simply for advocating for Nazi-like policies, otherwise you might just end up with John Pesutto. Who has been ordered to pay $300,000 to prolific anti-transgender activist and MP Moira Deeming.

I’m going to be really specific with my accusations against Moira Deeming, because apparently that’s what is required now: Moira Deeming is an MP who advocates against the rights of transgender people to fully exist in public society under the guise of protecting ‘sex-based rights’ of cisgender women to exist in public society without interacting with transgender women. (i.e. via excluding trans women from public bathrooms and other services) Additionally, Moira Deeming has advocated against gender transition healthcare.

Is this nazism? According to the Victorian Court, it is not.

Is this a policy of the Nazis? As we explored in this post, Yes. Nazi authorities revoked passes issued by previous governments that gave transgender people the right to live fully as the sex they are.

Additionally, Nazi’s burned down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the only place in Germany where transgender people could seek transition healthcare. Moira Deeming wishes to restrict the availability of transition healthcare, suggesting it is harmful and experimental.

By 1936, Nazis were rounding up transgender people and sending them to labor camps, under the guise of protecting children from the “Jugendverderber”, seducers of youth.

Below is a post from Kellie-Jay Keen, where she describes all transgender people as master groomers. Kellie-Jay Keen was a co-organiser with Moira Deeming for the LWS rally.

For good measure, here is Angie Jones suggesting that “sex deception” (trans people) grooms children.

It is not clear to me what the effective difference is here. To me, if you outwork nazi-aligned goals against my existence, you are as much as a threat to me as someone who claims the title of nazi.

You can burn down a trans healthcare centre, or you can work to make trans healthcare illegal. The impacts are the same.

You can write for Der Stürmer talking about Jugendverderber or you can tweet about how trans people are “grooming on an industrial scale”. The effects are the same, you are outworking the goals of Nazism. Whether intentional or not.

When you are seen doing the work of the Nazis, actual Nazis will notice. And that is exactly what happened at the 2023 Let Women’s Speak Rally in Melbourne, where they came out in support of Deeming and the LWS rally.

The National Socialist Network, the group which appeared to support Moira Deeming at the Let Women’s Speak event in 2023, make it clear what their goals are on Telegram; “It’s a win that these paedo events are being shut down, but one day the aim needs to be removing them from society all together.”

Angie Jones, one of the core organisers of the LWS rally, has her own thoughts on the topic:

Ironically Angela posted this post shortly after lamenting about having people claim she is associated with nazis, and how she feels she was forced to “bend & grovel for forgiveness for sins that aren’t ours". Oh Angie, I wonder how that feels. As a trans woman I’ve never been sent a list of crimes I’ve been told I’m responsible for somehow. /s

So why did Moira Deeming win her defamation case?

Well, let’s explore the judgement to find out.

In the introduction section of the judgement, Moira Deeming is introduced as this;

Mrs Deeming is, and has been for some years, a passionate advocate for the preservation or reinstatement of sex-based rights and safeguards for women and children (such as female only bathrooms and changerooms).

This is an uncritical framing of her anti-transgender views, which aim to remove the rights of transgender people to exist in society. The Judge appears to completely accept this framing.

Note that when trans rights is mentioned, it is mentioned in double quotes.

At around the same time, various other protestors gathered to express their views. They included “trans rights” and gender diverse activists, and a group of men in black clothing who were identified as members of the National Socialist Network, and were described as “Nazis” or “neo-Nazis”.

I’ll be generous and suggest this is an oversight. But this bias appears consistent throughout. With the Judge accepting so-called sex-based rights as an acceptable term for Moira’s anti-trans activism.

In testing for truthfulness of whether Moira is a hateful anti-transgender activist, this is what is included in the judgement.

568 - It can be accepted that Mrs Deeming’s expressed views on such things as the preservation or reinstatement of biological sex-based rights and her opposition to medical transitioning practises used on gender non-conforming, autistic and gay minors are “controversial” are “polarising” in the sense that other political constituencies disagree with her, often strongly. But that is not the same thing as saying that she has a “bad reputation”.

Note that the Judge accepts the framing of medical transition as something which is imposed upon transgender children, and even goes far to uncritically suggest that medical transition is imposed on gay minors. A common lie by transphobes who claim that gender transition is used to convert gay people into straight transgender people, a blatant attempt to pit transgender and gay people against eachother, and something which is wholly rejected by the gay community. This lie is pedaled by UK hate groups like Genspect.

Further to that, the Judge fails to see that these so-called ‘sex-based rights’ solely revolve around the exclusion of trans people. This is an egregious oversight by the cisgender judge, and is the equivalent of a white judge in the not-too-distant past writing something claiming that a person is an advocate of ‘biological race-based rights’.

That example would involve a judge blindly failing to see the issue for what it is, and it’s direct links to Nazi ideology.

How can a judge that is so primed to accept anti-transgender framing be able to competently deliver a fair verdict?

So what is Moira Deeming?

I’ve always operated with the idea that if you are working to outwork the goals of a specific ideology, you belong to that ideology, regardless of how much you wish to distance yourself from it.

I don’t believe that Moira holds Nazi beliefs. I believe she holds some extremist and false beliefs about transgender people which have caused her to advocate against our rights.

However pointing out links to Nazism appears to only become an issue of defamation to claim that a person is a Nazi only when they;
a) don’t claim to be one and,
b) aren’t outworking all the goals of Nazism.

But I am a transgender woman, and the portion of Nazism I am most concerned about is the one where my rights are stripped away, and then I am sent to camps for refusing to either detransition, or remove myself from full participation in society.

I don’t know what Moira’s views are on the proposed punishment for women who fail to fall into line with the laws she wants to implement. The trans women who will continue to use female facilities in line with their affirmed sex. But I certainly don’t want to find out.

If I see you outworking those goals of Nazism, as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to see you as a Nazi.

But Moira, I won’t call you one.

That’s between you and God.