The Times reports on this triumph of self-cancellation:

An academic has withdrawn her upcoming book from Oxford University Press and accused the publisher of helping to launder “genocidal fascism” against trans people as apolitical philosophies.

The publisher defended its right to publish works on “a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints” after Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada, attacked it and withdrew her book on 18th-century humour.

I have to say, someone who could claim that feminist women who don’t believe men can be women represent “genocidal fascism” seems to me the wrong kind of person to write about 18th century humor. Alexander Pope she ain’t.

I mean that literally. It’s a ridiculous, ignorant claim, hyperbolic for the sake of it and obviously not even slightly true. It’s stupid, it’s childish, it’s way beneath a working academic. Men don’t drop dead because we don’t believe they’re women, and nobody tries to slaughter them because we don’t believe they’re women. There is no genocide here.

In a blog post, she claimed the decision by the OUP to publish a second book by Holly Lawford-Smith, a gender-critical feminist from Australia, had contributed to a genocidal agenda, and that the publisher was helping to launder “transphobia”.

…

She wrote: “Honestly, it makes me sick. I cannot stomach the thought of allowing my own labours to feed a press willing to lend its reputation to ‘gender critical’ fascism.” She also pointed to research by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an American charity, which claimed the gender-critical movement “advanced a genocidal agenda through tactics that include laundering fascist ideas as apolitical ‘philosophies’”, adding: “OUP’s publication of this kind of material therefore directly contributes to this agenda by granting it scholarly credibility.”

Oh ffs, that’s embarrassing. As we discovered months ago, “the Lemkin Institute” is a big nothing, a shopfront, a name on a letterhead and nothing else. There is no institute. It’s a crank pretending to be an institute, and fooling people like Zuroski.

I’ll have to dig up her wretched blog post now.