Portland Mobilizes and Shuts Down Anti-Trans Hate Group with Links to the Far-Right

Report on recent mobilization in Portland, Oregon against anti-trans hate group with links to the far-Right. For more information on the Women’s Declaration International (WDI), go here.

photos: @marcielinenovatore

A few months ago, Women’s Declaration International (WDI) announced their intention to have a “nationwide gender abolition tour” comprised of three stops: Philly, San Francisco, and Portland. The final Portland stop of their tour amounted to booking a room at the Hollywood Library on November 19th and giving speeches inside.

For those unfamiliar with WDI, they are a trans-eliminationist group deeply embedded with the far-Right and conservative religious groups who directly collaborate to craft anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, in particular targeting trans people. More information on their history can be found here. WDI is closely intertwined with Lierre Keith’s front group, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). Older radicals will remember the long history of conflict between anarchists and Keith (as well as her other project Deep Green Resistance). Keith oversaw planning for this photo-op in Portland and attempted to prepare WDI’s hapless attendees by regurgitating some activist trainings from her days in the Left. As the event neared, they cultivated and actively celebrated the loud support of far-Right actors like Andy Ngo. Having been pied last year on Portland, their plan for a redo was to aggressively posture as innocent helpless women, take a pie or two and comfortably denounce that as unfathomably extreme violence.

However the trans-eliminationists dramatically underestimated the resolve of Portland and people’s readiness to stand against genocide. Combined with a host of incompetent missteps, the result was all the complete disintegration of all their plans with Keith’s reactionary foot-soldiers shocked, and sadly running home covered in pie and silly string – plus, at least in one case, a tag scrawled across their backs.

The night before their rally, Rose City Antifa released a write up on WDI and their plans, which had been obtained through a variety of infiltrators in the reactionaries’ planning group. In their meeting, beyond all of the disgusting transphobic and far-Right vitriol, they frankly admitted their pretense of caring for women and children was merely a cynical cover to mask their transphobia. The “direct action” they had planned was simply to obtain footage of a few dissidents and single out “crazies” to “make the trans look bad.” Essentially a contrived “self-victimization” tour that they hoped would boost their attention among the far-Right media sphere, while personally risking almost nothing so long as they stuck to Keith’s orders.

Following the failure of their attempted rallies last year, there have been sharp divisions within the trans-eliminationist movement over how openly to collaborate with other far-Right forces, as well as arguments over how directly violent to be on the streets against trans people. It’s important to be clear that these are merely differences in degree and openness. Keith, for instance, has no objection to friendly appearances on white nationalist podcasts or openly cultivating relationships with far-Right figures, and, through DGR, she is an open advocate of extreme insurgent violence by reactionaries. But Keith represents a faction that wants to obscure these existing alliances and commitments so as to facilitate WoLF and WDI’s continued influence of state power and the radicalization of recruits who do not know what they’re getting into. This stands in contrast with other factions who openly brag about macing children and relationships with Proud Boys, and want their violence to be open and public. To keep her grip on the trans-eliminationist movement and her strategy of respectability and hidden power levels, Keith needed a win in Portland.

If the public release of RCA’s article left them shocked, scrambling, and internally recriminating, the woes of Keith’s soldiers were only getting started. The morning of the rally, they reportedly woke up to find all their tires had been slashed. After being outraged that 911 dispatchers refused to treat this as an emergency and then an awkward ride in two Uhaul moving vans, they arrived to the Hollywood library two hours late, and were greeted not with a handful of individuals they could mock but over 100 community members assembled under trans flags. A table with pies of a variety of flavors hosted a large stack of flyers detailing the hate group. Posters of the reactionaries’ faces and personal details covered the neighborhood. Even though the library had closed, many initially skeptical bystanders in the local community quickly pivoted into enthusiastic in support for the disruption after being shown the extent of WDI and WoLF’s trans-eliminationist activities and policies.

In response to the unexpected strength of counter-protesters, Keith’s soldiers gave up on rallying inside or even outside the library and chose instead to try to hold a short flash mob on a minor street corner a few blocks away, whereupon they were chased off in a deluge of pies and tomato juice, a scuffle that they claim also saw their phones and cameras snatched, depriving them of any useful footage for the contrived pity party they wanted. Meanwhile a small handful of TERFs who had not been with the core clique and showed up on their own were left without support from Keith’s soldiers and were ejected in various levels of embarrassment, including one who left with a circle-a spray painted on their back.

Reportedly this hot new trend of tagging a TERF is already sweeping the nation. Forget train cars or heaven spots, if your tag isn’t riding around town on the backside of a genocidal bigot, can you even say you’re up?