Keen on truth

Keen and I first crossed paths online more than a decade ago, before terms such as gender critical and sex realist had entered the political lexicon. The years since have seen her surrounded by a baying mob in New Zealand, defamed by senior politicians in Australia and repeatedly questioned by British police, most memorably for being “untoward about paedophiles”. 

So, over beer in the sweltering sunshine of a Wiltshire pub garden, one of Britain’s most controversial and consequential campaigners reflects on the movement she helped build—and what she believes still remains to be done.

“My role was to sound the alarm, to tell women who don’t get invited to conferences: ‘Your voice matters. If you care about this, you can and should speak,’” she says. “I’ve done that. Everyone can now talk about men in women’s spaces. So now I’m branching out.”

Keen is quick to stress that she has not abandoned the fight against transgenderism. Instead, she has expanded her campaigning to include Islam, migration and the importance of recognising sex differences, issues she regards as inseparable from women’s rights. The shift has won her new supporters while alienating some old ones. Keen is untroubled and insists her aim is to tell the truth as she sees it. 

At Speaker’s Corner last year, she spotted two young women wearing niqabs.

“I saw their niqabs, perhaps unfairly, as a provocation. I shouted, ‘Free your faces, ladies. Liberate yourselves.’”

She says a recording of the moment spread rapidly across the Middle East.

“It went viral in Saudi Arabia. I received well over a hundred messages from women who created temporary Twitter accounts just to contact me before deleting them again. They told me they felt forgotten by the wider world.”

One message has stayed with her.

“A woman wrote: ‘I haven’t felt the sun on my face since I was 12. I can’t go into my own garden with my face uncovered. I only know what day it is by looking at the calendar because every day is the same. When my parents go away and I have to visit the corner shop for food, it’s the greatest adventure of my life.’”

It is one of the paradoxes of Keen’s campaigning that women she is accused of vilifying and hating, those brought up in strict Islamic households have sometimes been those most grateful to hear her speak.

“Women here are not beaten or killed for failing to wear make-up, and our fathers are not ordering us to wear padded bras or expose our breasts.”

Does Keen accept the argument that we all have our own version of the niqab, that her own face is to some extent hidden under make-up?

“I won’t pretend that my own use of make-up is an entirely free choice. Had I grown up in a culture where women did not wear it, I probably would not. I wear it partly because of the culture in which I was raised. 

“Also, I am heterosexual and I like men to find me attractive. That is part of who I am…. But it is not equivalent. Women here are not beaten or killed for failing to wear make-up, and our fathers are not ordering us to wear padded bras or expose our breasts.”

Keen’s criticism of Islam is rooted as much in theology as in politics. She points to the traditional Islamic accounts that describe Aisha as nine when her marriage to Muhammad was consummated, arguing that they normalise child rape. 

“I now see women wearing niqabs even in the small town near me. This is spreading, and if we don’t speak now, we may eventually be unable to… Migration is a huge issue, and I think we’re fools not to recognise it as a threat to our freedom.”

In May she shared a platform at the Unite the Kingdom rally alongside the anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson, also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. When I ask why, she shrugs off the controversy.

“I don’t do guilt by association,” she says. “People said he was exploiting the grooming gangs scandal. I don’t think he was, but even if he had been, I cared far more that he was bringing it to the attention of people who needed to hear about it.”

“I think he made the same mistake many of us did with the trans issue. He thought he could simply point to the evidence and say, ‘Look, girls are being raped,’ and people would reply, ‘Good God, we’d better do something.’ I don’t think he had any idea what was coming down the line.”

Keen accepts that her new focus has cost her allies. “Loads of women aren’t coming with me on this,” she says. “They’re frightened of being called racist and xenophobic. But that’s exactly why I have to speak.”

It is consistent with the adamantine independence that has defined her campaigning. Despite her ultra-feminine appearance, she cheerfully describes herself as “quite stereotypically male” and says she has never been afraid to put her own needs before other people’s feelings.

“I’m someone who doesn’t like injustice or unfairness. I can’t bear it. But I also can’t bear people whining about stuff and not doing anything about it. When someone tells me, ‘Oh, there’s a man who uses the women’s toilets at work and it’s really difficult,’ I’m like, ‘Well, fuck. What have you done? Why haven’t you said anything?’”

That instinct, she says, has been with her since childhood. At 11, a trip to the café in John Lewis was, for the working-class Keen, “a massive treat”. When a homeless man came and sat directly beside her, making her feel uncomfortable, she confronted him.

“If you don’t move, I will get louder and louder until my parents hear, and then you will have to move.”

She smiles. “That’s who I am.”

Yet Keen’s self-confidence is not invulnerable. She admits she has been hurt by the “trashing” she has received from other women in the feminist movement. 

“one feminist activist compared her to ‘dog shit’, another derided her supporters as ‘domesticated zombies’, and a third dubbed her ‘Nazi Barbie’.”

The deepest rift came in 2018, after she travelled to the United States to speak about transgenderism at an event organised by the Heritage Foundation. In response, the left-wing feminist group Woman’s Place UK withdrew an invitation for Keen to appear on one of its panels, and both trans and some feminist activists seized on the episode as proof that she had aligned herself with the American right.

The effect was an outpouring of vitriol against Keen and an attempt to make her socially untouchable. At the height of the campaign, one feminist activist compared her to “dog shit”, another derided her supporters as “domesticated zombies”, and a third dubbed her “Nazi Barbie”. Keen responded by changing her profile picture on social media to a Barbie doll in an SS uniform. Seven years on, and despite huge success, there is still a glimmer of rage about the cruelty to which she was subjected by women who claim to be part of a sisterhood.

“I was repeatedly told by feminists that I couldn’t be a feminist if I stayed at home with my children, held certain views or refused to hate anti-abortion women. Eventually I thought: fine, then I’m not a feminist.”

It’s fair to say that in the intervening years Keen has gone her own way. Despite her respect and affection for radical lesbian feminists like Sheila Jeffreys and Julia Long, she has long abandoned ideas about behavioural differences between the sexes being socially constructed. And she is a convert to Trumpism.

“I’m a big fan of the orange man in the White House, I’m a big fan. Big fan of Trump.” She says, in a line that could be a Presidential tweet.

“If America had elected Kamala Harris, women’s rights would not have been anywhere near where they are now. And I said a long time ago, I’d forgo the right to abortion and the safety of that if we knew what a woman was. Because if we know what a woman is, we can win back the right to our bodies and autonomy over abortion. But if we don’t know what a woman is, then whose rights are they?”

“Everything feminism is blamed for happened because it benefited someone, and it wasn’t fucking women.”

That willingness to make uncomfortable political trade-offs runs through much of Keen’s thinking. Yet, despite her admiration for Trump, Keen has little patience for the men who blame feminism for Britain’s decline. She frequently confronts them online. 

“Sometimes men say to me, ‘Feminism has ruined this country.’ And I’m like, ‘Feminism, or deindustrialisation?’ Everything feminism is blamed for happened because it benefited someone, and it wasn’t fucking women.

“For example, politicians have become obsessed with free childcare and getting women back to work as quickly as possible. Maybe the government should make it easier for parents to look after their own children during those first three years. 

“My parents married at 17 and 18. They were working class, but saved so they could afford to buy a house. Today you can have two teachers and still not afford one. Yet we’re importing loads of cheap labour, and I don’t understand how the left can support that when it’s working-class people who lose out.”

For Keen, these are symptoms of a wider political failure.

“I think Reform is the only hope for the next government. Nationalism, but not ethno-nationalism, is the best chance we have. If Labour get in again, we’re fucked. It’s not that I’m a fan of Farage — we met and he promptly ghosted me. I just don’t see a realistic alternative.”

There is a tension between Keen’s willingness to make political trade-offs and the charismatic campaigner who tells supporters, “I never lose.” On the perennial problem of male violence, she appears strikingly resigned to the status quo. 

“Everything I do is through the lens of women because I am one. But I’ve got three sons, and I think it’s difficult to be a decent man in today’s society.

“When there’s a bump in the night it’s my husband who checks it out. I believe decent men are the only ones who can deal with bad men.”

“When the police engage with us, we’re already guilty because of the things we say.”

She argues that the state is no longer performing that basic function. The increasingly routine raids on high street shops, carried out in broad daylight, are evidence that too many young men no longer fear the consequences of breaking the law. Meanwhile, she says, the police have become distracted by policing speech rather than crime.

“When the police engage with us, we’re already guilty because of the things we say. It’s almost like, whatever comes at us, well, you’re asking for it.

“And I don’t agree with the idea that ‘the process is the punishment’. The process is just the process. There’s never a resolution. It’s always, ‘Well, this has happened to you. We’ll look into it.’ And then nothing changes.”

If the police cannot or will not maintain order, I ask whether women are left relying not on the rule of law but on the character of individual men. Isn’t that, in essence, the same bargain women are expected to accept under systems such as Sharia? Keen thinks the comparison misses something fundamental: men are not merely socialised to protect women, she argues, but evolved to do so. 

“We are mammals. We might be intelligent, sentient, wonderful mammals, but we are mammals. The lion’s job is not to hunt, not to get food. The lion’s job is simply just to stop other lions from killing or impregnating lionesses.

“Part of masculinity is the desire and need to protect, and that also comes with an appreciation of women. My husband has to do right by me, and I have to do right by him. And if he doesn’t do right by me, I might leave. If I don’t do right by him, he also might leave.”

But for any such bargain to work, there has to be a shared understanding of what it means to “do right”. That, ultimately, is Keen’s message. She believes each of us has a duty to speak up when we see something that is wrong. Whether that’s men who insist women cover themselves up so as not to incite their lust, fetishists walking into the ladies’ loos or men using prostitutes and pornography.

“Empowerment” has become one of those drippy, overused and underwhelming words. Yet, in essence, that is what Keen offers, and she promotes it with the energy of an evangelical preacher. 

Keen may no longer call herself a feminist. But she has done something few feminists ever manage: she has persuaded thousands of women across the world that their opinions and voices matter.