Australian TERF, Nicole Phillips, maintains Daily Stormer style "Evidence" website about transgender women
Australian TERF, Nicole Phillips, maintains Daily Stormer style "Evidence" website about transgender women
The 72-Page Document Attempts to Mirror Far-Right Tactics, Inflating Crimes to Perpetuate Anti-Trans Bigotry.
An Australian TERF and one of the heads of LGB Alliance Australia, Nicole Phillips, has been identified as the creator behind a 72-page 'evidence' document cataloguing alleged crimes by transgender people. The document, which attempts to link transgender identity to criminality, mirrors neo-Nazi tactics from sites like the Daily Stormer.
The Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi website, maintains on their site a database of every crime committed by a black/brown person to paint the racist and false picture that black/brown people are inherently criminal. This allows them to perpetuate the notion that there is an ongoing race war between white and black people in order to further the political goals of demonisation and, ultimately, mass deportation of brown people.
The strategy of the Daily Stormer assumes an inherent bias in the reader against people of colour. It works to turn that bias in the reader into outright bigotry, having them go on to believe that being an ethnic minority in itself is inherently criminal. So in applying the neo-nazi strategy, Nicole Phillips is attempting to link transness to crime in much the same way.
“Evidence” is a 72-page Google document, a catalogue of so-called “Transwomen’s [sic] crimes”. This document notes that it is maintained by Nicole Mowbray, a self-described “Academic Librarian”. Lucy from Naarm can exclusively reveal that Nicole Mowbray is actually Nicole Phillips, a TERF from the central highlands of Victoria, Australia.
The document, created on Mar 2, 2023, and updated with obsessive regularity, sometimes multiple times a week, includes a range of criminal cases, some involving cisgender individuals, drag performers, or those with only peripheral connections to the transgender community. Notably, there are cases included in the document involving men in women's clothing while committing crimes despite explicitly not identifying as transgender. These inclusions serve to inflate the association between crime and transgender identity and additionally work to pad out this 72-page document.
Much like how the Daily Stormer inflates crime statistics involving people of color to incite racial hatred, Phillips’ document compiles crimes—many of which are unrelated to transgender individuals—to foster a false narrative that trans people are inherently dangerous. Both movements rely on similar strategies: exploiting pre-existing biases in their audience and encouraging outright bigotry through the manipulation of facts.
It should go without saying that because transgender people make up at least 1% of the population, it is expected that transgender people would commit crimes at much the same rate as the cisgender population and, therefore, turn up in crime news about 1% of the time. This is, of course, an oversimplification, and over-policing of marginalised groups will lead to this figure being higher, especially in relation to transgender women who are sex workers.
Self-described “Empath” Nicole Phillips runs a small business called Nicole Phillips Design. The business accounts have been used to harass and spread misinformation about transgender people on the /r/transgenderau subreddit under the guise of being concerned, a practice called concern trolling.
It appears that Nicole Phillips is not proud of her beliefs. Nicole has appeared on Sky News for LGB Alliance Australia under her pseudonym. This shows that the ongoing use of Nicole Mowbray as a pseudonym seems to be an effort to avoid implicating her name and her business, Nicole Phillips Design, in her hateful beliefs and so-called activism.
However, Nicole Phillips Design’s Gmail accounts were used to maintain the document on many occasions. The usage of Nicole Phillips Design’s Gmail accounts, which we have chosen not to reveal, to maintain the hateful document implicates the business directly in the hateful actions.
This campaign highlighted here follows a troubling trend in TERF activism, the mirroring of far-right and extremist movements’ tactics.1 In this case, the foregrounding of criminal stories regarding our community contributes to encouraging those who already have implicit biases against transgender people to take action against them, further marginalizing the already vulnerable population.