by Kara Dansky – first published to substack on May 15, 2023
On Mother’s Day, Sunday May 14, a contingent of US-based signatories to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights went to the headquarters of the UN in New York City to protest against the erasure of women in general and of mothers in particular, internationally. WDI live-streamed our speeches, and if you’d like, you can watch them here.
Here are some photos of the action, some of them serious, others a bit more silly and fun.
What you can’t see from watching the video or looking at the photos is that there was a small handful of counter-protesters nearby, and we were aware of their presence.
After our talks, we took our banners to the corner of 47th St. and 2nd Ave. to show them to pedestrians and car traffic.
The counter protesters followed us. They seemed to want to silence our voices by playing terrible music from a really sad-looking speaker, but they failed to do that because we had already delivered our speeches and because we weren’t even talking at that time anyway. Our banners did our talking for us. They also tried to block our banners from view, but they weren’t very good at that either, because there were so few of them. We refused to be deterred, and just kept moving around. This is them, doing their best:
As readers know, women who spread messages like ours are often met with violence from people like these who don’t think that women ought to be allowed to stand up for ourselves and our sex-based rights. These fools didn’t try to assault us, presumably because there were too few of them to be able to engage in mob violence and they didn’t want to be identified by countless eye-witnesses on 2nd Ave. assaulting women, and they were visibly frustrated by not being able to deter us. At one point, I asked them if they wanted to have a conversation and one man barely managed to grunt in response. Mostly they just acted like idiots. Several of us captured their antics on video, and WDI USA hopes to be able to share footage of that soon.
We had a great day, and we’re confident that we got our message across to many passersby, several of whom expressed support for our message and were happy to take one of our fliers:
This is Jesika Gonzalez, founder of the TERF Collective, capturing our general mood quite effectively (you can follow them on Twitter at @TERFCollective if you don’t already).
Onward.
