'I trust their condemnation' - protester at book launch of 'Sex and Gender'

[ArabellaScott]

https://twitter.com/Ross_Patterson_/status/1712248223669100908

Student at Edinburgh University admits he 'doesn't know too much about' the book he's protesting at the launch of.

How many people are 'condemning' things they actually have no idea about?

Deleted it now. I wonder if he's belatedly realising he's made an utter fool of himself in the last 24 hours. I also wonder if it's possible that someone at the U of E has been in touch.

Oh, bugger, I didn't archive.

Clearly he's desperate for attention.

You’d hope someone at the UoE has been in touch - not least because he’s made it clear that he only attended the protest about something he knows nothing about because he had a grudge against one of his colleagues who’d attended it. There’s an issue for HR to discuss.

Although I’m not sure I’d be willing to put much faith in UoE HR.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them".

This fellow as close to a textbook example as you could get.

2023 has given us an abundance of riches, from Isla Bryson to Austin Killips to Dylan Mulvaney to Mika Minio to Sarah Jane Baker to the little person attempting to sabotage Kath Stock to this fellow, who has realised he's messed up so monumentally that he's cancelled himself before the day is done.

LetThemSpeak...I say...KeepThemComing

Ha!

😂

Oh dear. 😂

I think his field of interest is potentially world changing and it is disappointing but unsurprising that the same rigour is not applied throughout his life.

Thank you for your flawed thinking reference @ArabellaScott . Sometimes we narrow our focus too much.

Seems this charmer is a UCU branch anti-casualisation officer.

One wonders how it has come to pass that a union rep - a union rep! - can make such liberal use of a misogynistic slur word.

Probably hoping for a political career. If his name should turn up on a shortlist in a year or two, I hope the screenshots from today will be deployed.

I used to work in a university and was a member of UCU. I left because I felt my subs were being used in large part to fund political campaigns, e.g. boycott Israel, instead of what I wanted, which was skilled and effective representation and negotiation with employers over pay, pensions, working conditions and the like. I had little confidence that if I'd got into any difficulty I could have got much real help from UCU.

Imagine being a woman working in the Biological Sciences or Chemistry departments of U of E and needing help from your union. Your local rep is Dr Jonny Dennis. Would you expect non-judgemental, constructive support?

The Times have an article with a different take from Jonny's. The disgusting creeps were grabbing at the legs of the women attending 😬

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-rights-crowd-assaulted-guests-at-gender-book-launch-ggn9qdtf7

https://archive.ph/0xQj8 (archive link to the article)

Compare and contrast to an LGBTQ+ event happening nearby which went ahead with no obstruction and no demonstrations.

Well I haven't read the book either, but since (I understand that) it's a book about WOMEN and is written by a WOMAN, then surely that should actually appeal to Dr Jonny's mindset.

But only if he considers the opinions of an educated woman worth reading.

Ah, I think I see the flaw in the logic there.

Great, I came looking for The Times article, thanks for posting it, @IcakethereforeIam.

Dr Jonny claims trans activists were being kicked by the nasty wimmin, The Times say the TRAs were grabbing legs. Hmm. I think I see a connection there.

Either Dr Jonny doesn't know that women's legs were being grabbed (doesn't care) or he hasn't bothered to find out, thus displaying his very incurious mind.

Or maybe he thinks women should just put up with what ever is dished out to them.

Abusive man claims his wife headbutted his fist.

Of course, there is footage of everything.

https://www.newsflare.com/video/596536/shame-on-you-chant-pro-trans-activists-protesting-against-book-launch-in-edinburgh

Here's Jonny.

Why were attendees being forced to walk through them at all. Why didn’t security just keep a clear walkway with the barriers and tell the (small number of) protesters to sit and whinge either side of it?

For all the shouting about stuff, it’s clear that the protesters and ucu aren’t very representative of the UoE community. It looks like a very small minority who are good at seeking attention.

Johnny makes a great poster boy for that. He’s got some borrowed rhetoric he’s never really looked in to (and doesn’t understand!). Yet he’s determined to position himself as the spokesman for the protest!

The crotch thrusting is also an interesting approach.

This was a book launch ffs. A bunch of highly privileged kids protesting a book launch.

Sexual violence. Always front and centre. It's interesting isn't it? The first response of an angry male wishing to control a female is to talk about or flash the penis.

How the male identifies at the time does nothing ever to adapt this: in fact it makes it worse since in the many, many male people I know and work with without exciting identities manage to be cross and handle it without their dicks getting involved, or shouting about and enacting raping or sexually murdering everyone. It's almost like it's not normal or typical behaviour even among male people, and something else is at play.

Reminds me of my dad who would declare ‘a village has lost its idiot!’ when someone said it did something spectacularly stupid.

There are so many village idiots these days! And they seem quite proud of it.

'If sex=gender then I had gender with your mum'

One of their delightfully artisan placards reads thus. Held up by a woman as far as I can see.

What on earth does it mean?

Sex does not equal gender. Isn't it them who think that? Do they really think a woman can impregnate another? And the holder of the placard was nowhere near even born when my mum was born just after WW1.

As to the grammatical illiteracy of 'having gender' .... brain malfunction.

If these are Edinburgh University students, I'm not impressed at all by the standards there.

His petulant reply to the (well-deserved) telling-off he’s receiving on TwitterX is that 'the women should have used the side entrance, then'.

It's interesting, in a forensic sense, to watch someone unravelling in real time as the nasty little tactics they thought they could get away with are being called out and pulled apart. He didn’t expect this to happen. And is spiralling in consequence.

Johnny’s hubris is quite remarkable here.

Imagine not actually knowing anything about the book but taking it from a couple of friends and X/twitter that it must be written by bad people and deciding to set yourself up as the public face of and spokesman for the protest.

Imagine being angry at a colleague and deciding to express that by doing this because she’s running the event.

It’s remarkable.

How frightening for any attendee to have to navigate that to enter the building. How on earth did security think this would play out. But then do security have any power to remove these protestors?