Futile flouncing
Joan Smith on The Usual Backlash:
For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.
There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and Bindel are part of the programme.
Attaboy Harry! Deprive the literary festival of your thoughts on Shakespeare and see if anyone gives the faintest tiniest damn. Do your best to punish women who don’t think what you think, and fail completely.
Then there was the American author, Hesse Phillips, who apparently uses “she/they” pronouns. “This decision was not taken lightly,” she/they declared in a lengthy statement this week. “I’ve conferred with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family, and in the end I feel that stepping down from my panel is the only way forward, both for my personal safety and my conscience.”
Who? Hesse who? Author of what?
Self-importance is not a desirable quality.
If you frown upon this proffered peace [and Joyce, and Bindel]
You will tempt the fury of my three attendants / Lean Famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire / Who, in a moment, even with the earth / Shall lay your stately and air-braving [academic] towers… Henry VI, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2, with ornamental additions in square brackets: [ ]
“Personal safety”?
Since when does anyone have anything to fear from people who don’t believe in magic gender? The threats and violence are one way only, coming from the trans activist side. You’re blaming entirely the wrong party.
maddog, you seem to be forgetting the Tinkerbell effect: non-belief in the ideology causes trans people to cease to exist. One assumes that the erasure magic is stronger the closer a trans person gets to the non-believer. What greater threat to personal safety could there be than having one’s existence snuffed out?
There’s also the ever-present danger that exposure to opposing views is going to force a person of gender to commit suicide.
(Indeed the creatures that caused everyone who looked at them to kill themselves in Bird Box were actually TERFs)