University of Sydney Women’s Collective Fascism
By: Dana Pham
Tags: Womens Rights, University, Abortion, Culture, Debate

Yesterday morning, LifeChoice Sydney ran a humble stall at the USyd Camperdown campus to invite respectful discussion and debate on the topic of ‘abortion ends a human life’. I know this pro-woman pro-child crowd — they just wanted to reach out to those who may not necessarily agree with their pro-life stance. Isn’t university suppose to be a place of freedom of intellectual inquiry? Of course, the University of Sydney Women’s Collective (WoCo) was not going to have any of it. Yesterday night Medium blogger Chriscoveries published his first-hand account of the counter protest that unfolded. Then WoCo published this version of events:

“The USyd Women’s Collective called a snap protest today in response to an anti-choice stall run by USyd LifeChoice, which is a USU-affiliated group that exists to campaign against abortion access. This stall, under the guise of mere philosophical debate, scrutinised the deeply personal decisions of people in crisis, calling into question people’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies. This caused many students passing by on their own campus to be made deeply uncomfortable.

The LifeChoice stall was joined by numerous known fascists. These fascists physically assaulted pro-choice protesters, seig heiled, and spat at us before we chased them off our campus. However, we were the ones campus security told to back down.

WoCo is unconditionally pro-choice. WoCo has always fought to protect people’s bodily autonomy and access to affordable, necessary healthcare — which is what free, safe, and legal abortions are. You can never end abortion entirely by outlawing it: you can only remove people’s access to safe abortion. When you remove access to safe abortion, people in crisis are left with even fewer options. We know that people who need abortions who cannot access safe medical abortions will often resort to unsafe backyard abortions, which can lead to serious bodily harm or even death. Criminalising abortion kills. Abortion access saves lives.

LifeChoice and the fascists that support it have no place on this campus.”

The truth is, WoCo were the fascists here, not LifeChoice, and I was another eyewitness to this. Here is my version of events to complement Chriscoveries’ version:

I love my pet rats, and I bring them along with me when I’m out and about, whenever and wherever I can. I’m just a typical rat owner, like a typical dog owner. So when I turned up to the LifeChoice stall in my LifeChoice t-shirt and two of my pet rats, one of the first things the WoCo mob did was accuse me of showing off how my pet rats are more important than women’s rights (this of course is not true). I was interrogated over this throughout the mobbing — since when do pets qualify for politicisation? They told me that whether I had rats or a dog with me, I’m still prioritising my pets over women’s rights.

During the interrogation, one of the protesters pretended to want to hear me justify my pro-life views, but I was struggling to do this because I kept getting distracted by two other protesters yelling at me constantly. I apologised to the pretending protester for struggling because of this, to which she replied, “I’m on their side”, then showed her true colours — she was trolling me from the beginning. Click here for what I actually think about the abortion issue. Another protester yelled at me, “How can you stand with the fascists, we’re the ones defending trans kids”. I politely told her that I’m a trans woman, to which she replied, “Well you’re the wrong kind of tranny then”.

Throughout the schoolyard bullying, I was concerned by the mob’s refusal to practice social distancing, so I tried my best to assert social distancing between the two camps, for which I was yelled at by the mob for, including criticising me for practising ‘respectability’ politics in the process. Only a fascist would make such a criticism. They accused a LifeChoice supporter on social media of unsubstantiated physical violence. The other side to this story is that I prevented a physical assault from occurring against the same LifeChoice supporter. Here’s photographic proof:

As you can tell, campus security personnel weren’t offering much assistance, other than asking me if I wanted to remove myself from the scene to a ‘safe space’ whilst my friends were under attack. Interestingly, once the mob reduced in numbers due to lunch, the remaining of the mob started to engage in civil disagreements with LifeChoice supporters (Chriscoveries was no longer on the scene by then). There was one WoCo member who I engaged with one-on-one during lunchtime who was not aggressive towards me as she was earlier on. Moral of the story — don’t underestimate the psychological power of collectivism!

But once lunch was over, and the LifeChoice supporters gathered together for a group photo, the mob came back to photobomb in order to continue with their destruction of private property, and hence the schoolyard bullying resumed. Reasserting social distancing is tiring! By then, LifeChoice Sydney’s stall booking was almost over, and the battle continued on social media. Here are three snippets of it — judge for yourself who the fascists are here:

The WoCo mob certainly have “unlearned” USyd-style. How can they survive in the real world like this? Someone’s personal decisions cannot fall under scrutiny if they choose not to engage with people who would allegedly scrutinise said decisions. Like their behaviour at O-Week in 2018, the WoCo mob don’t represent women, at all.