The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
If you hadn't heard, four gender critical feminists recently hosted a sold-out talk on the issue of gender identity at the Vancouver Public Library entitled Gender Identity and Women's Rights. The event generated controversy from its announcement due to its theme of questioning the concept of gender and gender identity and especially due to the fact that Meghan Murphy, owner of the Feminist Current web site that I most often go to and frequently link to, and who was recently permabanned from Twitter for rudely "misgendering" a male pedophile who goes by Jonathan, was announced as the main and headline speaker. Activists for the transgender movement demanded that the event be cancelled. The library tried to at first, petitioning the speakers about worries that they would violate Canada's law against hate speech (which of course they did not), but were rebuffed. Following on that failed attempt, transgender movement activists demanded that the library also host a "counter-event" organized by people supportive of the transgender movement. The library agreed to and furthermore rescheduled the originally-planned gender identity talk to 9:30 PM (after hours) on Thursday, January 10th and demanded that the speakers pay an addition $2,000 in security fees, and furthermore issued a public statement taking sides in the debate, explicitly condemning Meghan Murphy and stating that the Vancouver Public Library officially disagrees with the speakers associated with the talk.
The controversy generated by the gender identity talk backfired on its opponents in that it seemed to serve as free publicity. Despite the unreasonable hour, the event sold out and proceeded without incident despite a line of protesters attempting to block entry yelling about, of all things, border politics and waving signs with insane slogans comparing the speakers (branded "TERFs") to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. The audience was politically diverse and broadly supportive, and often enthusiastically so. For perspective, if you haven't been to library-hosted talks before, they typically generate an audience in the low double-digits, while this one was attended by at least 300 people. More watched the livestream online, the YouTube recording of which currently has 725 up-votes and just 38 down-votes, which amounts to a 95% positive response from those who watched it. By contrast, the aforementioned "counter event" scheduled for the next day was cancelled after proponents found their own panelists to be...wait for it...too "problematic".Yes. Purity test politics at their finest!
Here is the talk that has generated all this controversy. It begins at 20:46, so skip ahead to that point. I highly recommend it.
The talk was a tremendous success. It features four speakers (Meghan is up first). (I know only two are mentioned in the title. However, two other surprise speakers were included as well.) My fave of them were Lee Lakeman (a second wave activist who works at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, among other things) and Fay Blaney's "auntie", as she referred to her, who is one of the now-famous "two-spirit" Native women that transgender activists incorrectly claim are trans people. The older women are very different (e.g. Lakeman is vocal and energetic, while the "auntie" is soft-spoken), but they both lay down the IMO much-needed hard line and are just awesome and the indigenous women clarify that, contrary to claims of white transgender movement activists, no their cultures do NOT actually recognize "five genders".
There are also lots of fun moments (e.g. Meghan dares question whether cats make good pets) and lots of interesting questions from the audience when they get to the Q&A part after the speeches. Additionally, if you click on the link instead of watching the embedded video, on the right-hand side of the page, next to the video, there's also a recording of the online text chat of those who watched it live online exactly as it unfolded, which is awesome and really gives you a window into our (radical feminist) culture and how we think (and also how we interact with trolls
). For all these reasons and others, I HIGHLY recommend visiting the link and checking it out!
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
