Margaret Atwood

Candide. With all the difficult bits cut out.

What books are they replacing them with?

Actually, scratch 'edging'. It's rushing fucking headlong into George Orwell, while conveniently denying such a book as 1984 ever existed.

Earlier this year, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum after its advisory committee on equity agreed with a student who said the book’s themes were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures.

Other books recently removed from Canadian school libraries and/or curriculums in response to complaints about racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes, include Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.

JFC.

They are removing the books that teach people about standing up for what is right, about resisting groupthink, about questioning authority and about oppression. This is - well, it's beyond satire and edging right into dystopia.

And now they are removing her books from libraries. They’re literally coming for her. Regardless of her personal reaction, I feel very concerned about what’s happening in Canada.

Of course this was going to happen, and the blaming it on outside people, not the community itself. Propaganda is effective and powerful. See: demand for purity; dispensing of existence in Robert Lifton's 8 criteria of thought reform:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4382551-Live-not-by-lies-Solzhenitsyn-no-tambourines-involved?msgid=111900052

Does anyone recall the book in Canada that was being handed out in public libraries together with a librarian-supplied resource sheet for counter views? This was a half way house between pulling it entirely from the library? The library was in somewhere with a UK sort of name like Hull or Halifax?

No no, that's VERY deliberate, to blame the far right. It's a concerted ploy to lump any gender criticism in with alt right and far right extremist beliefs about women's rights, to downplay any effectiveness of the GC movement being in ANY way about true feminism.

There have been recent suggestions that the GC movement in the UK, and the LGB Alliance, are funded by the alt right Conservative Christians in the USA, people who are vehemently pro-life and very strongly in favour of sex stereotypes - there is no truth to it but it's an effective piece of propaganda.
Here is an article explaining where the extremely tenuous link came from and how it has been extrapolated out into a lie that is being regularly used to discredit both the LGB Alliance, and the UK GC feminists.
lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/10/gary-powell-why-the-gender-ideology-activists-are-wrong-about-me-the-heritage-foundation-and-lgb-alliance/

[quote AnyOldPrion]And now they are removing her books from libraries. They’re literally coming for her. Regardless of her personal reaction, I feel very concerned about what’s happening in Canada.

twitter.com/margaretatwood/status/1453416025064714249?s=21

www.cambridgetoday.ca/local-news/books-deemed-harmful-to-staff-and-students-are-being-removed-from-regions-public-school-libraries-4551859[/quote]
One of the comments below the article blame the far right, they’re so blinkered in Canada that they can’t even see that it’s the left that’s doing this. “Something wrong? Blame the far right, they’re just modern day Nazis!”

And now they are removing her books from libraries. They’re literally coming for her. Regardless of her personal reaction, I feel very concerned about what’s happening in Canada.

twitter.com/margaretatwood/status/1453416025064714249?s=21

www.cambridgetoday.ca/local-news/books-deemed-harmful-to-staff-and-students-are-being-removed-from-regions-public-school-libraries-4551859

Sorry, wrong thread.

Some of the comments on Facebook are terrifyingly obtuse.

Of course, the internet does help to overcome those kind of geographical barriers to an extent.

I had no idea of Canada's relative demographics. Thanks, pps. It's interesting how geography affects political and social movements.

That's interesting Lobster, so a particular political view is more likely to prevail. Especially one so expertly lobbied for.

She believes that the fact that the population in the UK is so clustered together makes it easier for people from different areas to congregate

This is a huge advantage for UK feminists and social movements in general, and definitely one of the reasons you have been as successful as you have so far. Canada's vastness and small population make organizing very, very difficult. I know there are women in my local area who are very sympathetic to this cause, but we'd lack any kind of critical mass or reach into the rest of the country.

Actually I see Canada's size as one of our greatest challenges in a greater social and political sense too. It is hard to hold together a country this big with so many separate internal identities.

One of the things with Canada is that the population is not that large, 38 million compared to 67 million in the UK, or 329 million in the US. And spread out over a much larger area, 4 people per square km, though bunched together to a large extent.

We just don't have the numbers and wealth for the plethora of media sources you have in the UK. And there has been really significant loss of small newspapers and small local television stations as well. There are two national newspapers, and two national broadcasters, one being the CBC. There are 98 daily papers, including free things, but only 7 are independent. Most of these have only very local distribution, and most run all the same stories as they are owned by the same major consortiums, one being the same one that owns CTV.

"This isn't Atwood dipping in her toe - she's been here before when she not only failed to support JKR but, iirc, contributed to the pile-on."

Yep. She marked her card for me back then, by being against JKR. Can't remember if it was an open letter against JKR in specific, or an open letter in support of the TRAs, but I remember being bitterly disappointed in her then. More so now.

Any of the transsexuals or moderate transwomen/transmen out there who believe that they are still the biological sex they started out as, otherwise they wouldn't have been feeling the need to transition (well duh!) are reviled by the TRAs and called transmedicalists or truscum. Some of you will already know this, of course, but any newcomers to this mess may not have heard the terms.

And this:
"She couldn't find arguments or science and nobody could signpost her even to a place on the map that said, 'Here be dragons' rather than 'Here be the endless oceans of emotion to distract you from the cavernous abyss where you'd hope to see the stores of knowledge'."
is an absolutely perfect way of expressing the situation.

If any of you haven't read her book yet, I heartily recommend it - it's as thoroughly researched as it could be (given the above) and is a good account of how things have played out over the last several years. VERY easy to read - unlike e.g. JB's jargon-filled rant in the Guardian recently, which I gave up on after about 3 sentences (and hopefully so did many other people - it wouldn't have been beneficial to them to try to continue anyway)

Yes very much this too.

I feel US and to a point Canada is used to operating in echo chambers anyway through class race and political structures, plus sheer size of the country.

Atwood tweeted the 1st piece and claimed it couldn't be problematic because it wasn't written by a TERF.

She kept emphasising the piece wasn't by a TERF.

To shore up her own position, Atwood posted on opinion piece by Jessica Triff (a TW) assuming that couldn't be problematic.

Atwood was (it seems) startled that the abuse towards her from TRAs continued. Under some degree of coercion (and possibly distress) from all this, to prove her credentials, she RT'd a Sciam piece for the 'science' to demonstrate she's onside with TRAs (the article was about DSDs and not her interpretation of it which is that 'sex is a spectrum') and also a popular video that criticised/abused/made erroneous claims about JKR and Maya.

This isn't Atwood dipping in her toe - she's been here before when she not only failed to support JKR but, iirc, contributed to the pile-on.

You'll be able to check a week from now and she'll still be getting f-you tweets. No one reads beyond the headline these days, and the headline for her now is that she is cancelled.
She could pull it back by starting a trans-only literary award, or doing some high-profile trans promotion but a significant number of TRA+ will have binned her now.
Even a neutral tweet will likely get hate replies.

Finding people to hate is part of the enjoyment of feeling righteous. The more prominent the person being cancelled, the greater the feeling of self satisfaction.

Margaret Atwood has done this before. It's not her first toe-dipping.

Thanks @ArabellaScott and @merrymouse

So she's been silenced? Or the initial retweet was a "mistake"? What a way to dip your toe in...

Yes @merrymouse American TRAs see the UK as an awful reactionary hellhole where lgbt ppl are not safe to walk the streets. Which is extraordinary to anyone who has spent time in both countries. But this is part of the problem ; few Americans need or want to travel. And the Internet seems to just reinforce prejudice.