“Amid outcry, Seattle Public Library weighs decision to provide venue for ‘radical feminist’ event criticized as anti-trans” (Seattle Times):
Community members including transgender locals and trans allies have inundated the Seattle Public Library with calls and emails, asking the library system to cancel an upcoming event hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front— a self-described “radical feminist organization” that has publicly espoused what critics call anti-trans views.
The group’s event, titled “Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity,” is publicized as “a critical analysis of gender identity” that will “make powerful arguments for sex-based women’s rights,” according to the event page. The event, scheduled to be held Feb. 1 in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Seattle Public Library – Central Branch, has placed the library at the center of a firestorm over how it can maintain its commitment to evolving ideas of intellectual freedom, provide access to information for the entire community, and be an inclusive space where all patrons feel safe and welcome.
Sometimes the best way to be inclusive is to exclude!
The library bureaucrats had only the best of intentions in selecting the kind of speech that would be allowed in this taxpayer-funded venue:
Marcellus Turner, chief librarian for the Seattle Public Library (SPL), said in a statement that the event request from the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was initially processed because it was labeled as a women’s-rights talk.
What if government bureaucrats are too busy to censor and deplatform on their own? Help is available from Alabama:
WoLF is not listed as a hate group in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extensive documentation of such groups in the U.S.
(If the SPLC lists WoLF next year, they can do another story about how hate is thriving under the hated Hater in Chief: “Hate groups reach record high: The number of hate groups operating across America rose to a record high – 1,020 – in 2018 as President Trump continued to fan the flames of white resentment over immigration and the country’s changing demographics.”; note that the same SPLC page says that the number of hate groups in 2011 was 1,018. U.S. population was only 311.6 million in 2011 while it is 330.1 million today and therefore the number of hate groups per capita has actually fallen by roughly 6 percent. The Age of Trump is the dawning of a new Age of Brotherhood/Sisterhood/BinaryResisterhood?)
Below, the proposed venue in which attendees may be triggered by hearing that “Women are female and men are male. It’s just not complicated,” from “Kara Dansky, a lawyer, WoLF board member and a scheduled speaker at February’s event.” If anyone needs to run out to find a safe space, he/she/ze will have a $166 million palace of hardcopy books in which to seek shelter. What turned out to be a Rem Koolhaas homeless shelter opened three years before the Amazon Kindle was launched from the same city (2004 and 2007):
Related:
- “Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?“: “Seemingly at least half of the retail stores in Seattle have an overt expression of support for the LGBTQIA community, e.g., a rainbow flag. Americans identifying as LGBTQIA are not half of the population, right? Why would stores managed and staffed by cisgender heterosexuals hang rainbow flags outside of Pride Month? Maybe folks in Seattle are unusually big-hearted and sympathetic to the vulnerable and victimized? Evidence against that theory is the enormous population of homeless who wander the streets and receive no assistance or attention from passersby. The good citizens of Seattle will step over a homeless person to get into a Tesla and drive to the rainbow flag shop. I didn’t see any store with a sign admonishing customers to do more or care more for the homeless or the poor.”
Oh come on, Phil, no one goes to the library anymore anyway so who cares what they do there? Here is NYC the libraries are now used as flophouses for vagrants. A friend who works as a librarian says that most of her work has to do with picking up hypodermic needles, calling the police to break up fights and calling the medics when someone passes out on the floor.
nonetheless, too funny that a hate group is fighting with a trans gender group.
Lest you think I’m kidding!
“Diane Christensen is providing a free Self-Defense Class on Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. in support of the Foundation’s mission of creating safe communities and respectful relationships.”
https://www.hickorync.gov/content/self-defense-class-patrick-beaver-memorial-library
You might say the whole enterprise was doomed to failure by dint of its architecture (from the Wikipedia link):
“Lawrence Cheek, the architecture critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, revisited the building in 2007 and found it “confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive” on the whole, with various features “decidedly unpleasant,” “relentlessly monotonous,” “badly designed and cheesily detailed,” “profoundly dreary and depressing,” and “cheaply finished or dysfunctional,” concluding that his earlier praise for the building was a “mistake.”[15]….The library was roundly condemned by the Project for Public Spaces, which noted “if the library were a true ‘community hub,’ its most active areas would connect directly to the street, spinning off activity in every direction. That is where Koolhaas’s library, sealed away from the sidewalks and streets around it, fails completely.”
Yup, that’s why I go to a library, to have activity spinning off in every direction.
Thanks Phil.
SPL canceling this event would be such a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. I’m almost curious to see what would happen if they tried it. The Skokie case in the 1970s established that actual Nazis could not be prevented from rallying in full regalia on public grounds. By contrast, this is a small group of women maintaining that women are adult human females, echoing the views of the entire country up to about 5 years ago.
If any Seattle readers want to go, feel free to sign up on the eventBrite page for “Fighting the New Misogyny”. The event is probably going to have an insane shitshow of weirdo protests, but I promise it won’t be boring!
I don’t think that they were ever trying to follow the First Amendment. The head librarian said “the event request from the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was initially processed because it was labeled as a women’s-rights talk.” So they applied a speech content standard initially, albeit incompetently (due to lack of guidance from the Southern Poverty Law Center!).
“women are adult human females”
Of course, I am compelled to hate this extreme point of view (if nothing else, the demise of the Rainbow Flag religion would render half of the posts on this weblog irrelevant), but I support the rights of fellow Americans to present it in a taxpayer-funded venue!
Damn, I miss the posts about helicopters and software.
Are you kidding me? This stuff is the cutting edge of civil rights – and may I also venture to say, everything important in the United States. He has perfect pitch, these are the issues of our time. Maybe Philip should offer a flight instruction course at the SPL to coincide with the Feb. 1 event. I would pay to see it.
I feel sorry for kids growing up today, I truly do. It must all be so confusing. As a child and young adolescent I was interested in software and helicopters (among other things) – which can be confusing enough – but my most pressing urge a few years into teenhood was that I was consumed by a burning desire to have my babysitter seduce me. She was a scorcher. I sighed deeply and consigned that to the realm of fantasy because of the problems it would cause.
As a geek/nerd type of guy, I wasn’t conventionally popular so I did the next best thing: I hit on a girl a couple years older than myself – a legal adult – who used to work at a local bank. She was 19, I was 16.5 (above the age of consent as I recall) and had just gotten my learner’s permit, so I drove to the bank one day and invited her to a weekend bash being hosted by a friend that coming weekend. I expected her to laugh at me and completely blow me off. Well, did she ever! She showed up in a tight denim bodysuit and heels. Straightened me right out, I never worried about my sexual orientation for even one instant after that, no matter what anyone in school might have called me. After all, none of them had girlfriends in College, but I did. She became a middle school teacher (for real) after she taught me a thing or two. I truly loved her, we surreptitously dated for months, and I still keep in touch with her, but we couldn’t stay together, which I actually regret now. How could she tell her friends in College that her boyfriend was a high school junior? Good times. Now we can’t even get people to agree that groups who have alternate definitions of gender still have First Amendement rights.
I’m glad I’m not in Philip’s position with an adolescent child living in a doppler-shift liberal town.
….and Photography. Though now that everybody’s phone is an uber-camera, that’s not relevant any more?
This kind of idiocy isn’t limited to events hosted by cisgender heteronormative radical feminists in Seattle, either. I had a hard time believing this was real when I first saw it. Jeff Sessions comes to speak at Northwestern U. (Medill!) and the student newspaper has to apologize for covering it! Insane. But then I realized, oh, of course! This is the nightmare, 20 years later.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-daily-northwestern-jeff-sessions-apology-20191112-agy5q7t7mbdb7fs3iqlhjimgpm-story.html
Keeping in mind I know nothing of this incident nor of the people involved… Sexual interests and gender identity are pretty much uncoupled, so much so that the standard outcome from a sex transition is cisgendered man or woman to homosexual woman or man. This observation comes from those times when people had a scientific interest on the matter, more than a political one. If the transition from man to woman did not alter the genital of the person transitioning, said person might well be considered a potential threat by women who do not have a penis, on the grounds that the transgendered woman might (1) be sexually attracted to women and (2) still have male genitalia. This concern is not just paranoia, and it is seems unfair to paint women who do not want to share intimate spaces with trans women as transphobic.
On the other hand, transgendered people prove that gender identity is mostly, if not fully, hard coded — here we have people who were brought up and socialised as either male or female, and yet they identify as the opposite sex. Clearly the idea that sexuality is just a social norm is wrong (to fully falsify one theory one just needs to falsify it once, in case anybody is confused). It would be nice if all parties could have a frank, open, and civil discussion on these matters, rather than degenerating into a political point scoring match, or as some alt-right propaganda meme. It stands to reason that, with a minimum of goodwill, everyone can go about their lives causing the least bother to other.