How WDI USA Leadership Misunderstands Civil Rights Era Nonviolent Direct Action

WDI USA president Kara Dansky & Lierre Keith, (WoLF), advocate nonviolent direct action to oppose gender identity policy. But is NVDA an effective and appropriate tactic for this fight?

Image Credit WDI USA

Over the last ten years, at least, aggressive trans activists and their associates have threatened, and in some cases committed, acts of violence whenever women meet or protest to voice opposition to gender identity policy. Kara Dansky, president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA), has extensive experience of these threats in both her current role, and her earlier work as a board member of Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). In 2020, she successfully worked with Seattle police to ensure women’s safety for a WoLF library panel discussion. There, trans activists, having failed to convince the Seattle Public Library to cancel the event, staged a loud demonstration outside the venue, creating “thumping and banging sounds,” and shouting insults at women who were protected by the police as they left. 

In November 2022, in Washington, DC, she again skillfully worked with law enforcement to gain protection for women during an outdoor Let Women Speak event. During the event, she reported that police frequently do not understand, or take seriously, threats posed by trans activists. She advised women planning such events that extra effort, including screening video of past events, is frequently necessary to get the point across. As in Seattle, no one was assaulted at this event.

That changed on November 19th when she and about 10 other women were physically attacked in Portland, a few blocks from the Hollywood branch of the Multnomah county library. Unlike Seattle and Washington, DC, this event was planned as a nonviolent direct action (NVDA); that is, the women would take no defensive measures against violence, in order to “make visible” the violence of trans activists that terrorizes resistance to gender identity policy. 

In zoom meetings to plan the event, captured by Rose City Antifa, who had infiltrated the sessions, organizers Lierre Keith, founder of WoLF, and Irene Lawrence of WDI USA, prepare the women who would give talks at the Portland event. Despite being known for advocacy around this singular issue, and the event billed as part of their “Gender Abolition Tour,” they instruct their speakers to not mention gender identity at all, because “that will make the crazies look even crazier.”

Lierre Keith explains:

We’re really just trying to have the theme of the event be violence against women… Without really even talking about this particular little dead end at all.. rape and battering and incest and prostitution and pornography and femicide and female genital mutilation and whatever it is you want to talk about… And it’s going to look even crazier when they come at us and try to shut us down and we haven’t even mentioned them. So, that’s the goal. So whatever hunk of that, abortion, poverty, capitalism, I don’t care! All the stuff that we used to be able to talk about that were feminist goals... That’s what we want the speeches to be about…

Keith further explains to the women, who will undergo NVDA training led by her the day before the event, that the goal is to get on-camera injuries. For example, they should wear sturdy shoes, in case their feet get stamped on, because those injuries would not be captured by video.

If we get trampled, you’re gonna get your toes broken, but that’s not going to show on camera. You’re just going to get hurt for no good reason. And when they throw stuff at us, and hit us in the head, it looks horrible on camera. For them. But if you get hurt in a way that nobody can see, you’re gonna be limping for six months, and it’s not gonna matter. So, we’re trying to be more strategic about the harms that we’re willing to absorb. And getting your feet hurt, your toes broken, is not going to mean anything to anybody. ‘Cause it doesn’t look dramatic on film. I hate to say it, but that’s how this technique works. 

The potential for violence, as is frequently the case for these events, seemed guaranteed. On November 7th, 12 days ahead of the event, a local group announced their intent to disrupt the event. Two days later, the county security director for the library reached out to organizers to 

Notify us that a therapist reported a patient who had stated, “I am going to the event and bringing my gun and if anyone messes with me I will use it.”

The night before the event, organizers and several speakers for the panel had their car tires slashed at their Airbnb and the library was vandalized with grafitti. Library officials decided to close the library for the day, while allowing the WDI event to continue in the reserved room. On the way to the venue, organizers received reports that a group had already formed outside the building and that their entry to the library could not be secured. A few blocks from the venue, the head of county security and the library president asked organizers to stop the van and allow them in. They expressed concern for “the safety of library staff, event attendees, nearby patrons of the coffee shop, and the elderly people living upstairs,” and asked organizers to consider cancelling their event.

Dansky reported in a twitter space that they had just “seconds” to make their decision, which was to hold their event, not in the library, but rather, on the street where they were, about 3 blocks from the venue. There, about ten women, and a passerby, were assaulted by an estimated 30-50 trans activists halfway through the first speech. Punched, knocked to the ground, kicked, assaulted with pepper spray and cans filled with unknown liquid, 4 women were injured severely enough to warrant a trip to the ER. Despite several calls to the police, no help arrived. (Hours later, Portland police took statements from the women.)

Dansky reports that a factor in her decision to go ahead with the event was the county official assuring her that she had the Portland police “on speed dial” and would call at the first sign of “criminal activity.” It is unknown whether the official called the police, or they ignored her call, or even whether she and Dansky had clarified what constituted “criminal activity.” In any case, Portland police are not known for timely responses to calls, in part, due to low staffing. At 1.26 officers per 1000 residents, “the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) ranks 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities for its staffing-to-population ratio.”  

In addition, several women had their cell phones and GoPro cameras stolen by trans activists, thwarting their intended goal of documenting the violence on camera. Nevertheless, organizers counted the action a “success” in terms of adhering to nonviolence.

WDI USA vice-president Lauren Levey congratulated the women on Facebook:

Lierre Keith and Kara Dansky began requiring participants in their actions to sign and adhere to NVDA agreements following an incident at an October 2022 Let Women Speak event in Tacoma, Washington. This event was part of a tour featuring UK campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen. As tensions between Keen’s supporters and trans activists became palpable, Keith hustled Keen away to safety. The other women were chased to their cars by trans activists and one woman had her phone broken and hand injured. At some point, a woman who felt threatened used pepper spray against a high-school aged transactivist. Soon after the incident, Keith and Dansky announced the new policy.

Dansky and Keith draw on the black civil rights movement to advocate for NVDA as a tactic. Dansky posted images of the lunch counter sit-ins on twitter last November and both encourage women to watch a film about the 1961 Freedom Rides. The goal of the rides on interstate buses, initially organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was to compel the federal government to enforce two Supreme Court decisions, (Boynton v. Virginia (1960) and Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946)), that banned segregated interstate travel. The Freedom riders were met with savage violence in the Deep South, brutally beaten by mobs, with some requiring hospitalization. Freedom rider Frederick Leonard noted that some riders were “damaged for life” and that it was “amazing they were still living.”¹

In a recent twitter space, Dansky explained why leadership had decided that NVDA was an appropriate tactic for their movement: 

We think that nonviolent direct action as a political tactic is the best way for movements like ours to make a difference. We have no political power. We have no public face. We have almost no money.²

Our goal at WDI USA with respect to these events is to not keep ourselves safe… Our goal is to speak and to make the male violence against us visible. If you do not want to do that, then please do not. If your goal is to keep women safe, by all means, keep women safe… Our goal with these actions is to deliberately put ourselves on the line and make male violence against women visible.

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But are the tactics of the civil rights era, of that particular political context, appropriate and effective for women agitating against gender identity policy today?

Nonviolent direct action, wherein demonstrators who are attacked do not defend themselves, is a performative tactic, political theater requiring a specific target audience, preferably one that may be sympathetic to your goals. The Gandhian version posits that “redemptive suffering;” i.e. enduring violence without resistance, could eventually change the hearts and minds of oppressors. That noble concept fell by the wayside early in the civil rights struggle, as idealists confronted the brutal tenacity with which segregationists would defend the system. As Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) explained in a discussion of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott:

We thought we could shame America…  But you can’t shame segregation… Rattlesnakes don’t commit suicide.  Ball teams don’t strike themselves out.  You’ve got to put ‘em out.³

The goal instead became to appeal to Northern whites in order to win their support for federal civil rights legislation. Violent attacks to enforce Jim Crow laws were expected in the south, but shocking to a northern audience. Activists also adhered to nonviolence in order to counter the stereotype of violent blacks which could undermine support from white allies.

The performance is most successful when there is a clear, tangible goal expressed through compelling visual imagery. One didn’t need to understand the complexities of the legacy of slavery, and the institution of Jim Crow laws, to see the fundamental injustice of violently preventing a citizen from eating at a lunch counter or riding a bus.

The principal visual WDI USA brought to their action was a banner with the slogan “Woman: Adult Human Female.” Popularized by UK campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, the slogan has come to represent the right wing faction of women resisting gender identity policy and law. Keen herself has long been a fixture on UK and US far right podcasts, including multiple interviews with both Carl Benjamin, former member of the nationalist UK Independent party (UKIP), and co-founder of Hearts of Oak; and Sebastian Gorka, former adviser to Viktor Orbán, and Trump administration official accused of having links to far-right groups in Europe.

Both Dansky and Keith have a history of working with right wing organizations such as Concerned Women for America and Heritage Foundation, and WoLF and WDI USA have written a number of amicus briefs for Alliance Defending Freedom cases. Ahead of the event, Rose City Antifa published a post describing the connections of both WoLF and WDI USA to the radical right and accusing them of being faux feminist groups. These connections, and the banner, are signifiers to many of “right wing anti-trans activism,” compromising their message and undermining their stated intent to simply demonstrate “male violence against women.” One sign protesting their event read, “Feminists don’t support the alt-right.”

It’s also unclear who was the intended audience. Without national news coverage, livestream, or video that can be shared outside Portland, only a few locals will have seen the action. Given that city’s reputation as a trans stronghold, and that WDI USA is known for opposition to gender identity policy, it seems likely that a minority of the local audience is sympathetic to their cause. It would be similar to holding a lunch counter sit-in that is only seen in a segregationist community.

The civil rights movement is remembered for its heroic campaigns of nonviolent action to integrate schools, lunch counters, and buses. Iconic images of brave activists enduring vicious insults and brutal assaults shape our national consciousness and understanding of these events. But the tactic was controversial in the black community from the beginning, and a number of scholars argue that serious gains were made only after other forms of resistance manifested in the movement.

Liberation struggles require psychological, as well as social and political transformations.  “Nonviolence required black men to passively endure humiliation and physical abuse—a bitter elixir for a group struggling to overcome the southern white stereotype of black men as servile and cowardly.”⁴ Many black people, men especially, viewed NVDA, with its ritual enactment of submission to violence from white oppressors as reproducing the master/slave relationship from which they sought to emancipate themselves.⁵

Nonviolence also prohibited men from defending family members who joined nonviolent protests - a line many were unwilling to cross.⁶ Forced to endure the many humiliations of segregation, many black men refused to discontinue one act of self-respect - the long-standing practice of armed self defense of families and neighborhoods, through informal patrols or just sitting on their porches with a rifle in the evenings to deter “night riders.” Rosa Parks recalled occasionally keeping vigil with her grandfather as a child because, “I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer.”

Threats of white violence escalated in southern black communities with the influx of young civil rights volunteers. Angered at the arrival of these “outside agitators,” white segregationists stepped up their terror campaigns, driving convoys of hooded men through black neighborhoods and tossing leaflets warning them against working with civil rights activists.⁷

The young activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE were committed to nonviolence, but the locals considered them “dangerously naive,” and refused to give up armed self-defense. Gradually, many of the civil rights workers came to a more realistic understanding of the local situation and tried to find compromises that would protect the community and allow activists to adhere to their ideals.

After intense debate, SNCC passed a resolution that local people had the right to defend themselves and SNCC would not discipline staffers who local people happened to protect. SNCC then reaffirmed its policy that no weapons were allowed in the Freedom Houses or in any SNCC office or project; nor would SNCC staff or volunteers be allowed to carry weapons.⁸

Nevertheless, by 1964, “many SNCC staffers carried weapons” while continuing to cultivate the image of a nonviolent organization.⁹ Dr Martin Luther King, Jr himself requested gun permits for his bodyguards while continuing to advocate nonviolence. The author of Freedom Summer (1965), Sally Belfrage, was warned against discussing armed self-defense in her book and she complied. Throughout the movement, activists attempted to chart a course between protecting themselves from deadly violence and maintaining an image that would not alienate the white allies they needed to achieve their goals.

The increased need for protection for civil rights activities led to the creation of a formal organization, the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana, the Deacons eventually grew to 21 chapters. While they never advocated violence, the Deacons asserted their right to self-defense, challenging the orthodoxy of nonviolent direct action. Historian Lance Hill explains:

The Deacons evolved a more flexible strategy—similar to the 1930s labor movement—that employed tactics of nonviolence, direct action, symbolic protest, and the judicious use of defensive force.¹⁰

The Deacons “attracted people who doubted the effectiveness of nonviolence but had no taste for riotous behavior.”¹¹ They guarded marches, protected local communities and actions, and eventually developed into a political organization to promote working class and local interests. National organizations were focused on appealing to northern whites and advancing federal legislative goals. The Deacons focused on desegregation and fair distribution of government services and resources at the local level.

For example, a year after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black people in Jonesboro were still prohibited from using the library, having access to books only through the bookmobile and unlike whites, did not have mail delivered to their homes. They had to instead go to the Post Office to collect their mail. With the Deacons leading and providing protection for local actions, the numbers of protesters swelled, and city officials were forced to back down.

[D]uring the previous summer the Jonesboro CORE would have been fortunate to attract twenty people to a desegregation protest—yet on 16 December a massive display of 236 protesters arrived at the Jonesboro library to integrate it. Overwhelmed, town officials quickly conceded and opened the library to blacks.¹²

In his history of the Deacons, Hill challenges the notion that nonviolent direct action alone secured the victories of the civil rights era. He points to riots prior to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as having finally forced action on that legislation. In Birmingham in May of 1963, young black men rioted after police used water cannons on protesters. Riots erupted there again in September, after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church. That summer violence broke out in a number of southern cities, including Lexington, North Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, Jackson, Mississippi, Bogalusa, Louisiana, and others.

Hill writes:

Only after the threat of black violence emerged did civil rights legislation move to the forefront of the national agenda. Only after the Deacons appeared were the civil rights laws effectively enforced and the obstructions of terrorists and complicit local law enforcement agencies neutralized… [R]iots and militant armed self-defense…provided moderates with a negotiation power that they had never enjoyed before.”¹³

Fundamental social change is never attributable to just one factor. While nonviolent direct action can be a powerful tactic, it is usually successful in conjunction with other, more militant, tactics. Economic, political, and social conditions also play a role. For example, while Gandhi led dramatic nonviolent protests, concurrent militant actions, as well as the inability of the British to maintain colonial power with resources depleted by two world wars, contributed to India achieving its independence.¹⁴

The emphasis on NVDA in recounting the history of the civil rights movement has created in the popular imagination a misunderstanding of the efficacy of the tactic and the complexity of factors necessary for its success. It was an honorable tactic, critical for  drawing national attention to the brutal reality of Jim Crow segregation and the violence deployed to enforce it. But NVDA to counter violent oppression is a highly risky tactic.  Success requires careful consideration of messaging, audience, local context and contemporary political, social, and economic factors. Otherwise, activists may be seriously harmed to no useful end.

Note: If you liked this article, you may also be interested in an older social movements piece comparing the civil rights movement with Occupy.

1. Eyes on the Prize, PBS, 1987.

2. WoLF’s fortunes have risen in recent years. Their IRS forms 990 in 2020 and 2021 together report revenue exceeding $1 million. Both Dansky and Keith, and their respective organizations, have a long history of working with powerful partners who are part of the Council for National Policy. These include Heritage Foundation, Concerned Women for America, Independent Women’s Forum, and Alliance Defending Freedom.

3. Eyes on the Prize, PBS. 1987.

4. Hill, Lance. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, p27. 2006. University of North Carolina Press.

5. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 3.

6. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 27.

7. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 30.

8. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 19.

9. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 18.

10. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 268.

11. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 269.

12. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 52.

13. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 259-262.

14. Gelderloos, Peter. How Nonviolence Protects the State. 2007. South End Press.