What Lavery said
Now to see if I can tolerate reading all of Grace Lavery’s Address to the Genderariat.
The emergence of a liberal ideology of trans rights over the last two decades has precipitated a crisis in higher education. The purpose of my lecture today will be to sketch the contours of that crisis as I see them, and to propose a couple of possible ways forward.
The trouble is though, it’s not a liberal ideology. Very much the opposite. It’s dictatorial and punitive, not liberal. It rests on bullshit claims and personal fantasies, which are not good foundations for a liberal ideology.
…there is in this room some number—perhaps a sizable number—of people who are perturbed by the growing conflict between certain members of the LGBT community and certain feminist activists and organizations. I hope to offer an account of that conflict that differs from the mainstream account, with which everyone in this room is familiar: that by insisting on the axiom that “trans women are women,” LGBT activists have engendered a set of conflicts between the rights of women and trans rights. In fact, no such conflicts exist, and the widespread attempt to diagnose them, however well-intentioned, has had the effect of weakening the women’s movement throughout the UK.
[Bronx cheer] Of course such conflicts exist. His presence is a conflict; his giving this talk is a conflict. He is displacing us. That is a conflict.
I do not believe that most of those responsible for this schism are feminists—many are simply reactionary trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos and Graham Linehan; some others are opportunistic centrist journalists like Helen Joyce and Jesse Singal; and still others are conservative ideologues like Toby Young and Rob Liddle.
Graham is nothing like Yiannopoulos. Helen is not “opportunistic” (and by the way what about the opportunism of “Grace” Lavery himself?).
However he admits there are some feminists who don’t bend the knee to him.
My argument today is not complex, and it is more or less encapsulated in the title of the lecture. Over the last decade, trans civil rights claims (particularly those of trans women, and especially those of trans women who love women) have become the scapegoat for an increasingly pervasive anxiety: that young people, or social media, or young people on social media, are incapable of rational thought, and their modes of reasoning need to be radically suppressed for the good of their blameless victims, which are sometimes figured as “women,” sometimes as “the university,” sometimes as “children,” and sometimes as “lesbians.” In order to defend this facially rather improbable account of the world, the gender critical movement must maintain a constant state of battle-readiness: always ready to swarm some graduate student on Twitter, to circulate some collection of memes that prove that trans teenagers are more likely to detransition than is widely believed, or to smear anyone who contradicts any of their positions as a rapist, a pedophile, an apologist for rapists or pedophiles, a misogynist, a wife-beater, a homophobe, or all of the above.
What a flippant way to describe the conflict – as well as inaccurate. What a male-centric way to ignore women’s concerns about our rights and change the subject to some mythic fretting about the social media habits of young people.
…the GC movement is not merely a threat to academic freedom, it is the greatest threat in a generation: not only have GC academics created a system whereby one teaches one’s students best when one teaches them at gunpoint, not only have they done so to the great delight of conservative politicians who despise the cultures of learning that have been sustained by the higher education sector, but they have done so while persuading liberal media outlets like the BBC and the Guardian that the students really do need to be put down for the good of the country.
Ok that’s enough of “Grace” Lavery.
The DARVO, it burns.
“…the GC movement is not merely a threat to academic freedom, it is the greatest threat in a generation:”
The greatest threat to “what” in a generation? Everything? All that we hold dear?
In order to defend their topsy-turvey account of the world, TRA’s like Lavery have to construct this world where they’re always the most victimized, always threatened by genocide, always bullied by vicious transphobes. And all they have to defend themselves with is rape threats, lawsuits, and other forms of intimidation.
We cannot end this great threat to academic freedom until nobody who believes other than we do can teach anywhere.
If memory serves me, Mister Lavery is the one who posted pics of his TIF partner that seem, well, misogynist and domestic abusey to me. One pic was of Lavery’s hand shoved into the gaping mouth of his partner. The other was a large bite mark on the face of his partner. Maybe stuff like that is the real reason men like Lavery are often seen as domestic abusers and perverts and misogynists?
But at least there is an admission, from a prominent TRA no less, that it is an ideology. It’s funny what they reveal about various parts of their thoughts and assumptions when their mind is on a different point.
Finally ,someone said it openly:
“The axiom that TWAW”
So they know this is not some conclusion arrived at by reasoning or the result of research or anything.
It is an axiom, something assumed to be true.
@Sonderval, it’s assumed to be true in the same way that when folks agitate for Black Lives Matter they assume, for the purposes of argument, that race is real and not socially constructed. Of course they all know that race is a myth and most of them even know that there’s more genetic variation among “Black” people than there is between “Black” people and “white” people. But in order to fight against racism, the fighters have to pretend for the moment that race is real. That is called strategic essentialism.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-strategic-essentialism/
Deep down, even Gray Slavery knows that trans women are men. We know that manhood isn’t just in a penis or a pair of testicles, but in every cell of a man’s body. But he insists that we must all accept the axiom that TWAW because he cannot fight for “trans rights” without assuming that. In that sense, it’s another type of strategic essentialism.
In order to agitate for “trans rights” (which consists, as far as I can tell, of the rights to override women’s personal boundaries and to damage the health of children), TRAs must insist on the truth of the TWAW axiom, which itself relies on the re-establishment of gender stereotypes. The idea of a “woman’s brain” in a man’s body cannot exist without gender essentialism, which the ideas of liberalism and second-wave feminism would leave behind. Queering first requires straighting.