Thread by @lascapigliata8

In the spirit of oversharing, I wanted to briefly write about a ptsd relapse I got from just observing unbridled male aggression in Australia toward #LetWomenSpeak attendees, as well as seeing so many women assaulted or manhandled, both by TRAs and by security/police. 🧵

I'm a naturalised Australian citizen and have spent my formative years in Melbourne. I love that city, and more broadly, I love Australia. However, I was also seriously traumatised by several things/people during the time I lived there.

Misogyny and male violence. Domestic violence and sexual assault. Police violence. Racism. Ill treatment of First Nations people, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants. Political propaganda against my people. Australia is not a perfect country and I saw some nasty sides to it.

But nothing could prepare me for the pig-headed determination of Australian media, politicians and TRAs to viciously malign women. To punch horses in the gut in order to get to women. To kick and hit women who gathered to speak about loss of rights and even knock them unconscious

God knows who was in charge when it was thought appropriate to parade uninvited neo-Nazis in the buffer zone between women and TRAs. To photograph them and put their pictures into papers while women remained unseen, uninterviewed, accused in their absence.

Who was in charge of the propaganda that claimed mostly Left women were "alt-right, neo-Nazis, making signs with their hands to signal their fascistic tendencies" and the rest of the incomprehensible nonsense that nonetheless ended up with a female MP being targeted?

The rabid, misogynistic mob escalated in Hobart, and in Canberra you could barely hear women speak. I can't imagine the stress #LetWomenSpeak women were under when police replied to them that if they were scared they should leave.

I can't get out of my mind the image of a female senator draped in Australian Aboriginal flag screaming abuse and charging at a woman speaking peacefully, her having to be brought to the ground because she just wouldn't stop trying to attack, her crawling away on her knees 😰

Pauline Hanson, a woman I knew as a racist joke of a politician, visibly shaken up. This woman laughed at her critics (whether I agree with her or not) but in Canberra she seemed as shaken up as all other women who simoply gathered to talk about their rights being taken away.

I can't help but feel that if all the misogynists weren't there, that the one woman who came to speak about her female friend who identified as male, who died because doctors missed her diagnosis of cervical cancer, could have spoken without interruption and maybe realised

That it's not more transactivism in healthcare that would have saved her friend's life, but exactly what #LetWomenSpeak are campaigning for - ethical, sex-based and evidence based medical care (among other things).

And then, after all was said and done and #LetWomenSpeak got a headline in The Australian - congratulations to all you wonderful women btw, you succeeded in raising awareness and if comment sections are any judge, the average Aussie is peaking like there's no tomorrow -

But New Zealand TRA politicians actually tried to (unsuccessfully) stop Kellie-Jay from entering the country, lest the violent misogynistic mob endangers the public. Deal with your violent misogynists New Zealand, before it's too late, ffs.

So anyway. I hardly slept since the #LetWomenSpeakMelbourne and my ptsd, with flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation and the rest has played up just watching it all. Now imagine traumatised women in Australia and NZ watching all this.

Imagine them attending these rallies to speak, in hope of stopping policies that would allow the worst abuses of vulnerable women that will undoubtedly occur in the absence of women's sex-based rights. I'm in awe of their courage and so worried for us all 😰❤️