Kellie-Jay Keen is candidate in Bristol Central (2024)

Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, has made an unexpected entry into the race to become Bristol Central’s first MP.

Keen, who used to live in Cotham, founded the Let Women Speak movement and will be standing for the Party of Women at the general election on July 4.

Her website describes her as “unapologetic and unafraid” who “believes that language is the key weapon in the arsenal of those who wish to erase women”.

Keen has also been referred to as an anti-transgender rights campaigner, a far-right transphobic activist and a bigot.

Red Flag Australia says that protests need to be held against her because her “myriad links to racist, hom*ophobic and sexist far-right figures and groups puts paid to the idea that there is something progressive about Parker’s supposed concerns for women”.

The Party of Women is a private company that was first registered in Bath in February with Keen, who has a correspondence address in Trowbridge in Wiltshire, named as its sole director.

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A post shared by Kellie-Jay Keen (@kelliejaykeen)

All candidates who want to stand for election in Bristol need to hand in their nomination papers in the council’s electoral services office at the B bond warehouse on Spike Island, where Keen left it until the last day possible but was accepted as a candidate.

On Friday, the self-declared “women’s rights advocate” also tweeted a video saying that there were no women’s toilets in the building that also houses the Create Centre and Bristol Archives.

She also told her followers on X that she does not think “it’s remotely appropriate for councils to be flying rainbow flags or wearing rainbow lanyards whilst pretending to have no political bias during an election”.

The Let Women Speak website says that their campaign “is to focus specifically on the word woman and other female language that clearly defines women and our rights”.

In Bristol Central, Keen – who used to be a member of the Labour Party in the former Bristol West CLP – has entered a straight two-horse race between two women candidates: the incumbent Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire and Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer.

Speaking in a live video on Friday, Keen mentioned how former Bristol Green councillor Jude English had been suspended and “treated abysmally apparently because she doesn’t think women have penises”.

Of Debbonaire, Keen said: “You might not have really heard of Thangam but that’s because she doesn’t really say anything of any interest.”

In her video, Keen said that there is an “existential threat posed by transgenderism and men in women’s spaces which I find frankly intolerable”.

She added that “the disruption has begun”.

“And to women in Bristol, at least one politician in Bristol gives a crap whether or not you can have a female-only space. And I say one politician, because I simply don’t know any others.”

Until recently, Keen was planning to stand in Brighton Kemptown, where former Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle has been suspended by the Labour Party following what he has called a “vexatious and politically motivated” anonymous complaint.

On the same day as Keen handed in her nomination papers for her new constituency in Bristol, a trans and intersex activist who doused her with tomato juice in New Zealand in 2023 pleaded guilty to two common assault charges.

At an event on College Green in 2022 of Keen’s group that was then called Standing For Women, dozens of counter-protesters disrupted what they called “a transphobic rally”.

Keen has said that there will be a Let Women Speak rally taking place in Bristol on July 2, two days before the general election.

Main photo: Let Women Speak

Read next:

• Bristol Central set to be key general election battleground
• Carol Vorderman: ‘I wish the race in Bristol Central wasn’t between two great women with strong political voices’
• Tories select general election candidate for Bristol Central