Grace Lavery on Woman’s Hour Today (7 April)

[CaveMum]

Why on earth I do not know, but the “delightful” Grace Lavery is on Woman’s Hour today.

This Grace Lavery

My only thought when Grace said Grace thought the media were exaggerating the amount of GC people as they hadn't received any hassle was that it's only one side that issues rape threats, death threats, intimidation, protests to shut down women's meetings etc. And that's the trans extremists. Not sure where wishing for the death of a 95 year old woman with covid fits in with that of course

This may well be Grace Lavery’s Prince Andrew interview moment. Do we think Grace is sitting at home having a manicure and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that went SOOOO well’.

@Mumsnut

'Word salad' is too kind a description.

Word porridge, maybe?

Word Ungodly Weetabix Concoction?

@Manderleyagain

I wasn't going to listen because I thought it was someone like that bloke who runs pink news waffling on. Then I saw this thread and tuned back in.

So much of what GL said was wrong, and its depressing that some academics and (as a pp put it) midwit students believe it. But the main thing I want to say is that I'm a gc feminists (roughly) and I have no desire to protest grace lavery, or to prevent her speaking. I definitely don't want to bang on the windows of the room to prevent other people hearing her. Her position is the more extreme and detached from reality of the theoretical positions than underpin the trans rights movement. The more people hear it the better. I hope she goes on newsnight and question time, start the week, lbc, talk radio, and I hope she describes everything that she believes in full. And the nation's bored and baffled listeners will form their own opinions.

Yep. That's the difference.

That's all they have. Word salad and violence.

I assume GLs partner is OK with all this penis chatter, what with one thing and another.

@Clymene

Go Emma!!

Oh fuck off Grace. We see you

This is exactly what I said in my strongly worded tirade at the radio while driving this morning. I had to remind myself not to roll my eyes too much in case I lost sight of the road in front of me.

@Artichokeleaves

It's been said from the start on FWR: all we ever had to do was get past no debate.

After that, all we have to do is let people like Grace make the case out loud and wait for everyone else to get the full picture.

Yes @Artichokeleaves reckon it was a good move by EB to just let GL speak

The basic argument was that people can change their sex by fiddling with their endocrine systems and secondary sex characteristics, and that although there is a naturally occurring group of people with a particular arrangement of chromosomes, restricting the label “female” to that group is a sop to patriarchy (Lavery calls this defining femaleness by ‘traits’).

But this is very obviously to misunderstand feminist critique. Patriarchy is the coercive attachment and conditioning of behavioural traits to the organically occurring group of people we recognise as female. Changing the definition of “female” doesn’t counter this flawed assignment of behavioural traits to people perceived as being female, as Lavery recognised when discussing the change in attitudes towards Lavery in student surveys.

However, I would counter that this change in attitudes could also be explained by Lavery’s self-identification into the category “marginalised person with protected characteristic”, rather than because people truly consider Lavery female.

But whatever. It’s nonsense on stilts.

Did Grace wish Prince Charles dead when he got covid or does Grace save Grace's bile for women?

Her logic on the Queen, as on much else, is incomprehensible. We don't live in the eighteenth century and the Queen doesn't have much practical power. But even in the eighteenth century, if a monarch died of sickness, that didn't result in a republic.
And as a linguist I take exception to the claim that "can a woman have a penis" is grammatically odd. She was implying that it was a question about permission, but it isn't. In some cases, "can" denotes permission (though prescriptivists traditionally frowned on this, preferring "may"), but not here. If the question is odd then the oddness is semantic and results from the contradiction in asking whether it's possible for a person who by definition lacks a penis to have one.

Word salad -

• I don't really know what I'm talking about
• I am a poor communicator
• I have no concept of accessibility
• I am trying to fog all this in pseudo intellectual waffle

That's the generous version.

@senua

Did Grace wish Prince Charles dead when he got covid or does Grace save Grace's bile for women?

The Queen.

@CaveMum

Ooh a "gender studies" student called Miranda has rolled in with the "but intersex" argument!

Fresh meat for the lols.

Yeah, that's what I thought!

Sorry that was reply to @WinterTrees

Shame there's so many on twitter having a go at EB. As a good friend of mine frequently says: 'never interrupt your enemies while they are making a mistake'.

I consider myself quite clever. Yes. And yet for a moment I thought “I am too stupid to understand this. I have missed something.”

But I’m not, and I haven’t.

See you, Grace. See you and your thingy.

Has anyone linked EB to this thread? Be great for her to see our support as we listened 😊

Yes, I thought EB managed that rather well - without GL ever realising it. It was well done.

@OutlookStalking

Has anyone linked EB to this thread? Be great for her to see our support as we listened 😊

I like to think Emma walks amongst us already 😊

@WinterTrees

It's going to be quite the transcribing challenge.

1000 words a minute, and all of them incoherent.

😆😆😆

This is a job for @tabbycatstripy

I hope her poor fingers have recovered from Maya's Tribunal marathon.

I've just listened to this and I'm torn - my first thought is WTAF is someone like this - a biological man - doing pontificating on "being a woman" and feminism. If I was doing the interviewing I would have put to them many more questions on various words and phrases used to drill down exactly what was meant. It was a very long interview.

He describes a moment in a hot tub where he experienced what sounds exactly like a moment of religious conversion - a feeling that came over him and told him to become a woman. A voice that communicated with him. Okay - fair enough - lots of people experience a religious conversion but they don't then demand that everyone around them constantly affirms it and changes their own behaviour accordingly.

This made me feel extremely angry and I was doing a lot of eye rolling as they went on and on, using flowery language and long words to obfuscate around having to answer a question.

On the other hand I'm glad that people like this are given airtime and that their views are exposed to the light in a lengthy interview. People can actually hear what they have to say in full - and disagree with it if they want to.

However, I would have liked to have someone like Helen Joyce, a biological woman and author of 'Trans' come on to counter some of the points.