Grace Lavery reviews Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, and Kathleen Stock

[ArabeIIaScott]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/

Lavery is very proud of this piece. I've got halfway through and am going to have to have a wee break and maybe a nap.

So far, I gather that Lavery knows far more than these women do about womanhood, because Lavery has read a lot of books.

tl;dr: Here's Lavery's conclusion:

'Material Girls is the work of an anti-feminist gadfly, circumventing peer review to talk about philosophers she doesn’t really understand; Trans is an incoherent set of vapid polemics by an author of singular incuriosity, by far the least credible of the three; and Feminism for Women is a reactionary feminist’s cri de coeur—at its best, genuinely stirring, even for those readers unwilling to cheer on Bindel’s more lurid cruelties'

Seems particularly angry with Helen Joyce. Perhaps because of the famous Chickening Out incident, wherein Lavery backed out of a debate.

And at long last, the conclusion:

'Feminism, from Frances Power Cobbe to the present, has had a different and better answer: gender abolitionism. Gender abolitionists haven’t cared what a woman is, who wants to be one, or why; they have argued against all legal discrimination between men and women. Yes, this would mean the end of gender recognition certificates, as well as many other elements of legal segregation that we take for granted.'

So this is Lavery's suggestion.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.

I'm struggling to see the difference between that and things MR@ 's say, such as 'there are no sex based rights' and 'feminists brought this on themselves'

Apologies, btw, about the two conclusions - I thought I'd got to the end but I hadn't quite, it was just a false summit.

Will any of those three brilliant women be arsed to write a rebuttal / takedown of this utter drivel?

DYING at the suggestion that Kathleen Stock doesn't understand philosophical arguments 😂

I put anything that man writes in the same category as Andrea Long Chu - an extra deep cesspit.

Does Lavery understand what the "critical" part of "gender critical" actually means...?

TBH this is one of my irritations about "gender critical" having been adopted by or applied to anyone who has any issues with any aspect of genderist ideology. It doesn't mean "anti-trans", it means "critical of gender stereotypes and the impact they have on BOTH sexes but" - given it's a tenet of radical feminism - "particularly women and girls".

I note that of course a male will breezily suggest all sex segregation and accommodation should be swept away, because they will never need the protections afforded.

Maybe worth asking women how they feel about removing all sex segregation and having every sport, space and institution completely mixed sex. Some thoughts may occur that aren't based on arcane academic theory.

cri de coeur

Better than a cri de penis

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Miss

This is really taking one for the team @ArabeIIaScott!

Isn't it great when males tell women they don't know what women are.

Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis

Good grief. This person claims to be a serious academic?

What absolute twaddle even for Lavery.

If there is no boycotting of gender crit views how come the LA review of books gives all three titles to be reviewed by someone who would trash them. How come Helen Joyce could find no publisher in the US for ages. We all know how this sort of thing works.

Though Can we just take a moment to thank Lavery for in person being as useful as the books he reviews in promoting gender crit arguments. If only we could make Lavery on video the main spokesman for the trans cause we would be way further along.

I suspect Lavery has more than a touch of the green-eyed monster going on. Those three books have been best-sellers, whereas Lavery's own Great Work hasn't exactly flown off the shelves.

Yawn.

Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007) and the Yogyakarta Principles are described as 'feminist texts'.

Robert Wintermute, who helped to draft the Yogyakarta Principles, said that the conflict with women’s rights was not discussed at the time the principles were written. How you conclude that something which failed to consider women's rights is 'feminist' is beyond me.

And as for a man writing about being a man pretending to be a woman as a 'feminist text'... Next no doubt Lavery is going to declare that his book about his penis is a feminist text.

This reads like all those ignorant, bileful comments men leave under feminist articles, but long-form, grandiloquent, and much more tedious.

The authors ... loudly proclaim themselves leftists

Lavery obviously knows nothing about Helen Joyce.

Lavery mocks Helen Joyce for saying something "spry", "trivial" and "complete and utter bullshit": ... Joyce’s statement that “sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.” (That spry sentence, indeed, might prevail against a stiff field to rank as the most trivial in Trans: breezy, confident, composed of simple words … and on no more than a second’s reflection, complete and utter bullshit.)

Lavery then, apparently with a straight face, in her conclusion says this: Gender is how women are oppressed; sex is the excuse patriarchy uses for the oppression of women.

And then, astonishingly, says this: Reality—the reality shared by women, actual women, in the world—really does matter for feminism. Metaphysical definitions of the category “woman” really, really don’t. Indeed they don't. But sex reality is physical reality, not metaphysics. TWAW is metaphysics. Lavery, have you peaked?

Oooh a man telling women to shut up and put up. Los Angeles Review of Books must be so edgy, so progressive. Can I be in their gang?

Cool that all three authoresses hail from Terf Island.

I guess even a neutral review would get the magazine cancelled in the brave New World. So the bad publicity does tell US gender skeptics what to order under plain cover

Does anyone know what Lavery's sales figures were?

Helen Joyce is Irish, so technically we can't claim her as one of Terf Island's own.

It's all jealousy, isn't it? Lavery was too scared even to debate with Joyce, presumably because Joyce would have wiped the floor with Lavery. Joyce has a formidable intelligence, whereas Lavery...er, doesn't.

Gosh you're brave OP, I can't bear to have a go at reading it personally.

Don't know what the sales of Lavery's book are like, but the first few reviews don't seem very impressed. I have a feeling they might all be Mumsnetters.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Please-Miss-Heartbreaking-Staggering-Penis-ebook/dp/B09PRGDVK5/