College Green is part of Bristol’s university district, and usually it is a sleepy part of town, with students catching up on their reading or gathering to do homework. But on June 19, a mob of activists wearing black masks (perhaps for their safety, but certainly not for anyone else’s) and balaclavas gathered to target a lecture held by a 60 women’s rights activists with Standing for Women in honor of Father’s Day. They screamed, jostled, and threatened. Police had to be called in to hold them back.
The activists, called together by the Bristol Anarchist Federation, were trans activists, and the reason for their rage was that the targeted women refused to recognize biological men as women.
The chants started off with the usual “trans rights are human rights!” muffled by masks; but very quickly, the trans activist were pushing police, pushing women, and hoisting signs of a much uglier nature. One sign stated that “TERFS” — trans exclusionary radical feminists, the label given to women who disagree with gender ideology — should “suck my d****.” Another burly fellow wrote a message on the ground: “After Colston TERFs are next.” The statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was famously thrown into the river in 2020. Women who disagree with trans activists are apparently no better than slave traders and should also end up at the bottom of the river.
As one activist noted on Twitter, the trans activists were essentially “outright stating that they want to topple women to the ground, tie them up by with rope and drag them through the streets of Bristol and dump their bodies in the river.”
The aggressive activists brought a megaphone, with one man — his face covered with a mask, naturally — shouting that the women being attacked were “oppressors” who were “taking rights from people.” The trans anarchists yelled that the women should “get out of the city”; they were booed; called “transphobes”; they sang loudly; one particularly paunchy bloke with a kerchief over his face held a tolerant sign reading: “Posie Parker Racist Trash.” The intimidation tactics were effective enough that police began to guard the doors and a line had to be formed in order to keep the trans activists back.
