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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Any info on Elke Mackenzie?

11 replies

TeacheeTeacherson · 07/02/2026 16:30

I’m compiling a complaint about a school assembly - anyone have any info on Elke Mackenzie (‘trans’ botanist with a beard referred to as ‘she’ throughout). Not someone I’ve heard of before, and Google is mostly coming up with the usual praise as an LGBT icon etc…

OP posts:
MrsOvertonsWindow · 07/02/2026 16:58

Is this him?

alumni.ed.ac.uk/services/notable-alumni/alumni-in-history/elke-mackenzie

TeacheeTeacherson · 07/02/2026 19:00

MrsOvertonsWindow · 07/02/2026 16:58

Yep- I’m looking for anything by Genevieve Gluck or someone like that, anything on autogynephilia etc.

OP posts:
Strictlysober · 07/02/2026 23:45

There are a couple of interesting observations here: Celebrating Elke Mackenzie: Explorer, scientist and lichenologist, in honour of LGBTQ+ History Month | The Wildlife Trusts
I note that in this article and in a response from ChatGPT it's said that this botanist was one of the few women to win a Polar medal, for their covert work in WW2. In WW2 they would have been around 30. They were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and transitioned at around 60. All of their career achievements are now credited to a woman.

Celebrating Elke Mackenzie: Explorer, scientist and lichenologist, in honour of LGBTQ+ History Month | The Wildlife Trusts

Finley Reynolds, Co-Chair of The Wildlife Trusts' Out for Nature network, explores the legacy of Elke Mackenzie—a trailblazing botanist and explorer whose lichenology work shaped natural sciences.

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/blog/wild-about-inclusion/celebrating-elke-mackenzie-explorer-scientist-and-lichenologist-honour

Strictlysober · 07/02/2026 23:50

Another article notes that they joined a drag theatre troupe: This was during the final stages of the Antarctic project. Lamb decided on transition, and also dropped her surname, taking her middle name, Mackenzie as her new surname and Elke as her personal name. She applied for a legal name change, new social security number and passport. Publications by Lamb started to acknowledge the technical assistance of Miss Elke Mackenzie. Elke also joined a theatre troupe directed by Laurence Senelick, the historian of theatre and drag performance.

Laurence Senelick - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Senelick

Strictlysober · 07/02/2026 23:57

Laurence Senelick’s The Changing Room, sex, drag and theatre has the following dedication:
“This book is dedicated to Elke Mackenzie, whose transformation taught many who enjoyed transvestism on stage to appreciate transsexualism in life”.

Evolutionarygoals · 08/02/2026 00:11

Strictlysober · 07/02/2026 23:45

There are a couple of interesting observations here: Celebrating Elke Mackenzie: Explorer, scientist and lichenologist, in honour of LGBTQ+ History Month | The Wildlife Trusts
I note that in this article and in a response from ChatGPT it's said that this botanist was one of the few women to win a Polar medal, for their covert work in WW2. In WW2 they would have been around 30. They were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and transitioned at around 60. All of their career achievements are now credited to a woman.

I don't know about other countries, but I'm pretty sure the UK didn't allow women to go to the Antarctic until some time in the 90s. About 50 years after this person was sent there...

Ereshkigalangcleg · 08/02/2026 02:26

Strictlysober · 07/02/2026 23:45

There are a couple of interesting observations here: Celebrating Elke Mackenzie: Explorer, scientist and lichenologist, in honour of LGBTQ+ History Month | The Wildlife Trusts
I note that in this article and in a response from ChatGPT it's said that this botanist was one of the few women to win a Polar medal, for their covert work in WW2. In WW2 they would have been around 30. They were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and transitioned at around 60. All of their career achievements are now credited to a woman.

Such bullshit, isn’t it?

SecretSquirrelLoo · 08/02/2026 08:36

Wait, he put his feminine alter ego into an auxiliary role in his research publications? Like a fantasy assistant?

InconvenientlyMaterial · 08/02/2026 08:54

So, were kids being gaslit in school assembly that this man's achievements were those of a woman?

Thus completely erasing the barriers women faced, and still, face in science and in society as a whole?

I would be apoplectic if so!

TeacheeTeacherson · 08/02/2026 11:52

InconvenientlyMaterial · 08/02/2026 08:54

So, were kids being gaslit in school assembly that this man's achievements were those of a woman?

Thus completely erasing the barriers women faced, and still, face in science and in society as a whole?

I would be apoplectic if so!

Yep, exactly! And references to ‘her wife’ in the sixties, as if lesbian marriage was allowed then….

Thank you everyone who has shared these things, I will be compiling a complaint email shortly!

OP posts:
POWNewcastleEastWallsend · 09/02/2026 11:26

Ivan Mackenzie Lamb's obituary in The Lichenologist in 1991 refers to him throughout with male pronouns and has a photo of him looking every inch the English Gentleman.

It concludes:

"In several articles published as occasional papers of the Farlow Herbarium (1972, 1973), Lamb acknowledged the technical assistance of Miss Elke Mackenzie, who as lichenologists were to find out, became his alter ego for the remaining 18 years of his life."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E0BD8737646993478FB59AE22B264F2F/S0024282991000142a.pdf/ivan_mackenzie_lamb_elke_mackenzie_19111990.pdf

"alter ego" or Autogynephilic Artefact?

Rod Fleming is a "chaser" and misogynist who loathes feminists and has some very old fashioned, homophobic "sexology" theories about what makes a person a man or a woman but he knows a lot about this subject and does not pull his punches:

The Autogynephilic Artefact: How it starts
https://www.rodfleming.com/autogynephilic-artefact-formation/

Lamb's grandson refers to him as his "grandfather" in this article in 2014. So his family do not seem very convinced that he "became a woman".

A Voyage To The Last Continent: Breaking The Ice In Antartica
By Antonio Mackenzie-Lamb

"My journey to Antarctica began in Ushuaia when I boarded the Ocean Diamond, a ship chartered by Quark Expeditions, one of a small handful of tour operators specializing in polar travel. I was making the journey not only to experience Antarctica’s wonders, but to pay my respects to someone I’d never met: my grandfather, Ivan Mackenzie Lamb, who was a scientist stationed on the Antarctic peninsula during World War II. A prominent botanist, he was part of a covert British expedition code-named Operation Tabarin, whose purpose was to establish a British presence during the turbulent wartime period. While stationed at Port Lockroy, my grandfather, whose specialty was the study of lichens, uncovered several fossils of pre-historic tropical plants which once flourished in Antarctica."

https://www.thestkittsnevisobserver.com/voyage-last-continent-breaking-ice-antartica/

The Unsung Heroine of Lichenology
Sabrina Imbler - Sept 26, 2020
(Infuriating article pretending Lamb was a woman, written by a they/them who is either a man pretending to be a woman or a woman pretending to be a man).

"Mackenzie, who died in 1990, transitioned in the final years of her career. Despite this, almost all of Mackenzie’s legacy exists under her former name. I chose not to share it here because I do not know Mackenzie’s relationship to her former name, and she has no way of consenting to its inclusion in this story."

One wonders what the "gender affirming surgery" mentioned in this article consisted of?

He was hospitalised with severe mental health problems and diagnosed with dysphonia prior to "transition". Maybe he had laryngeal surgery after buggering up his voice trying to sound like a woman?

https://daily.jstor.org/the-unsung-heroine-of-lichenology/

Knowing what transwidows tell us about the shenanigans their husbands get up to I am rather suspicious of this account, ie. that it was his wife who ran up debts in his name.

Obituary:
The Bryologist, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 315-320 (6 pages)

"The 1960's were trying years for Lamb. In addition to his extensive travel and field collecting, and the need for planning and implementing the antarctic research and preparation of final reports, scientific papers, and reviews, he had to contend with family and personal crises. Newspaper reports at the time said that debts incurred by Mrs. Lamb in her husband's name forced him to economize by taking quarters in The Farlow, where he subsisted on a diet of potato chips and Coca Cola. He wrote Taylor: "All this with the realization all was not well with me brought me psychologically down to my low state." A concerned colleague brought Lamb to the University Infirmary where he remained for three weeks. At this time he consulted a lawyer and obtained a legal separation. Soon after, he was advised by a psychiatrist to seek the help of a specialist in New York City in resolving a torment that left him uncomfortable with his gender. Lamb was diagnosed as having a Disfonia Syndrome. To correct the problem and achieve a proper identity required transsexual treatment."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3243974?read-now=1&seq=4

(Anyone can get a free account on JSTOR to read articles online and there is a button on the viewer to copy text).

ps. Sabrina Imbler, the they/them author of the Daily JSTOR article is all over the internet. Caught this but still no wiser if Sabrina is male or female because of the batshittery of gender identity ideology:

"I started thinking about how the personal can be present in nature writing, beyond “I’m a white man on a boat.” "
https://www.vogue.com/article/sabrina-imbler-how-far-the-light-reaches-interview

Very probably female, despite the "white man on a boat" comment, which might be a misleading allusion about the white man's colonisation of the ocean or some such crap.

"A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field,"
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/articles/get-to-know-sabrina-imbler/

So if the school is relying on articles like "The Unsung Heroine of Lichenology" by Sabrina there is plenty of scope for criticising the school for covertly introducing Queer Theory into the curriculum, via the "queering" of history by a propagandist who has disrespectfully ignored the testimony of Lamb's family, who still remember him as a father and grandfather. Her area of expertise is sea creatures, not children, education or history.

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