Lavery does not seem to be a pleasant or honest person but knows how to write the kind of academic-sounding prose so beloved by subscribers of the LARB, NYRB or LRB. These are influential publications in the world of academe (the latter two more so than the first). So, tedious as it is, it is necessary to take this piece apart, pompous bit by pompous bit.
The ad hominems, in particular against Helen Joyce, are ludicrous. Lavery writes that Joyce is an ‘Irish mathematics scholar who had a stint editing the finance pages of The Economist’ - unnecessarily dismissive of a senior journalist who worked at The Economist for almost two decades, lived as their correspondent in Latin America, is multilingual and has a PhD in mathematics from UCL. Lavery, who did not bother learning Japanese despite writing a book about East Asian culture, cannot equal these achievements, so has to resort to dishonestly misrepresenting them.
The quotes from Robin Morgan and Janice Raymond have now been recycled so often that they are awfully familiar. I’ve seen them in a New Yorker piece, Shon Faye’s book and a few other places but they are always used as gotchas, to show how terribly mean these terf foremothers were, and nobody ever bothers to read on. (Which is what Lavery has done for de Beauvoir, presumably irked by the many feminists who have pointed out that the ‘one does not become’ quote has been taken out of context. But that does not make de Beauvoir a biologist.)
Lavery reads a lot of GC writing, and some authors of the online Right. ‘Feminism - the word is taken’; ‘to do a cancel cancel’ are figures of speech imitating the phrases ‘Woman - the word is taken’ and ‘to do a racism’. Does Lavery not have anything better to do than to sniff around in online gutters, given we are in a ‘moment of economic collapse, biopolitical crisis, national fragmentation, and ecocidal catastrophe’? He can deride GCs as being concerned with trivialities but has he forgotten that he has written a whole book about his penis? (Apologies MNHQ, but I can’t write this sentence using ‘she’.)
As for the substantive criticism offered by this ‘noted scholar and prominent trans activist’, Lavery rightly says that women do not share all experiences (neither do men) but then goes on to mention the ‘reality shared by women, actual women, in the world’ - so which one is it? Being female is not ‘an experience’ but it is what someone is. And it is not what Grace Lavery is - which is fine - but it would be great to hear some new arguments instead of this badly concealed homage. Magdalen Berns’ ‘sophomoric’ humour? It’s hard to believe Lavery, whose own sense of humour seems rather crude, was not chuckling along …