Feminist Devin Buckley isn’t so happy with Harvard.
She was scheduled to speak at the iconic institution about British Romanticism.
But though her appearance was centered on poetry and philosophy, someone at the school discovered online information regarding her and transgenderism.
Fast forward to her talk getting 86’d.
As noted by The Post Millennial, Devin’s a board member for the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF).
Per its website, the group boasts a gender-related mission:
To abolish regressive gender roles and the epidemic of male violence using legal arguments, policy advocacy, and public education.
In service to said abolition, WoLF has a plan:
- Facilitate a cultural shift away from gender roles and sex-stereotypes.
- Defend sex-segregation of domestic violence shelters and prisons, which affects the most consistently vulnerable, impoverished, and abused women.
- Support the needs of lesbian and bisexual women.
- Speak out against targeted censorship and defend free speech for women.
Now prepare for the problematic:
- Defend sex-segregation of women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms.
- Support detransitioners in their struggle to be healed and heard.
On April 18th, Devin reportedly received an email from an English department employee:
I have some bad news. As we were preparing the application for next year’s funding, my co-coordinator looked you up on Google to include the correct details about you on the application.
Controversy was uncovered:
She was surprised to find that your public profile is largely rooted in controversial issues regarding trans identity and that you’re on the board of an organization that takes a public stance regarding trans people as dangerous and deceptive. Since you’re mostly engaging in the public sphere as more of a polemicist than Romanticist, this puts the…department and myself in an uneasy position.
From Merriam-Webster:
polemic: an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another
The email, continued:
Really, it’s not so much because of your own personal conviction regarding trans identity. It’s more about the public stance you’ve taken and how you’ve recently crafted a professional presence around these issues.
I’m so sorry we can’t extend the formal invitation I promised you. You’ve done cutting-edge work in the study of Romanticism and religion. Maybe we can work out some other kind of engagement elsewhere in the future.
Devin’s none too impressed.
“This is a case of Harvard deplatforming me for political reasons entirely unrelated to my scholarship,” she wrote in return.
And she served up a sizable point:
If it is unacceptable for me to speak at Harvard on British poetry and philosophy because I am a feminist, then I invite Harvard to purge its libraries and museums of all those who hold views unacceptable to Harvard.
If I am to be silenced, then why do the tomes and treatises of history’s innumerable sexist, racist, homophobes still sit on Harvard’s hallowed shelves and continue to be cited with reverence? Harvard should cleanse them all and leave nothing but the purity of empty space.
Devin also clarified that WoLF only “claimed that some trans-identified males are dangerous in virtue of being predators,” and that men in women’s prisons “are a threat…because they are violent males.”
As for her assertion about libraries and museums, we’re living in unusual times: Many online and on television are characterizing transgender tenets as if an opposing perspective would be a shock — even though biologically-based, sex-separated sentiment has been held by virtually everyone who has ever lived before.
As I’ve indicated previously, society is informing us that we must now take on a new category of identity. In the past, there was no such thing as “gender” — including “cisgender.” Each individual had a name and a sex. Beyond that, there was nothing.
If we are to cancel all who didn’t previously recognize a third column — or a fourth (personal pronouns) — it seems to me we’re going to end up with a world that doesn’t go back very far.
But this is modernity. And this is politics. And for Devin Buckley, apparently, this is a no-go for speaking to Ivy League students about poetry.
-ALEX
See more content from me:
Actor Mark Wahlberg’s Message to America: ‘Let’s Do the Rosary Together,’ Stay ‘Prayed Up’
Lady Drops Her Phone in an Outhouse, Tries to Retrieve It and Falls in — Says the Fire Department
Find all my RedState work here.
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