Re. the Cass report: the framing of trans civil rights claims in the UK comes down to a matter of whether you think transition is a tragic outcome, or a good one. I think it’s a good one. I am moved, galvanized, aroused, and intrigued when people take control of their own bodies. The focus on detransitioners—to whom, bon courage!!—seems designed to nourish a fantasy that transition produces sad, deluded, thwarted, unfuckable, sick, barren weirdos. That fantasy, of course, serves those who might at some point have wanted to transition, and didn’t.

Portland has been so great. Powell’s was a dream, I reconnected unexpectedly with three former students, from different eras, at the event; I met some younger trans women who spoke kindly about what my work has meant to them; and I ate at a truly spectacular restaurant—TERCET. 💖 And I’ve published so many essays in the last week, and ppl have been nice about them too, mostly! Filled with a profound sense of gratitude about the unearned joys in my life. Ten years ago this month I left grad school/Philly, and this life would have seemed unattainable.

If the phrase “loony grad student, best ignored” doesn’t make your blood boil, you have absolutely no business being in higher education. Everyone who works in this space has a particular thing that irks them more than anything, for me it is the contemptuous, misogynist, defensive, predatory, opposite-of-teaching response that Christa Peterson generates.

I’m ready to disclose the details of the prior restraint of my research. The culprit is University College London, whose lawyers instructed the executive editor of their online journal THINK PIECES to pull my essay. The essay is linked here.

gracelavery.org/undermining-ac… The doc was initially submitted as a pdf without footnotes—since it was to be published online, and citations would take the form of links, I used screencaps. When uploading the document to my own website, I added links myself. Here’s the original pdf.

gracelavery.org/wp-content/upl…

I think this is clear, but since some people have misunderstood (surely not willfully?), let me clarify: I don’t blame *any* of the GCs for the university’s spinelessness. I fully anticipate their support, as I support their right to publish in whatever venues will have them.

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1666880277594140672

Like many, I’m concerned about the circumvention of peer review in a couple of recent cases, and I would not myself want to publish in a venue that prints their work. But I’m not against them publishing, and if a Uni prevented them from doing so I would be mad as hell.

Just as a reminder: in 2019, Prof. Kathleen Stock took issue with a student newspaper article reporting on campus climate. The article quoted people who didn’t like her positions. Prof. Stock called this libel, and instigated a hate campaign against the student journalist.

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1450549636943556610

In order to prove not only that the piece was not libelous, but that Stock did not seriously think it was, and only claimed in order to force retraction, I republished the offending article, unedited, on my own website, in 2021:

gracelavery.org/prof-stock-ple…

General methodological observation: what has freaked UK administrators out about my work is that it actually names, quotes, and cites individual activists. This is because I do not want to make generalizations that are unmoored from the facts. This might seem to be a mark of creditable scholarship. It’s certainly different from the usual run of GC “scholarship,” which mostly consists of uncited (because false) claims about what trans people think about themselves, and endless readings of a single Stonewall pamphlet.

I have just learned that a major British university has intervened to prevent a house journal from publishing a juried essay of mine, on the importance of academic freedom. They are scared that they will be sued—I presume by either Kathleen Stock or Alice Sullivan. I will publish the details of this development very shortly—hopefully within 24h—including the essay itself. I will then give @Docstockk and @ProfAliceS an opportunity to affirm their commitment to academic freedom.

not freaky weirdo British school psychoanalytic theorist of the mid twentieth century Wilfred Bion being marshaled as an intellectual progenitor of contemporary fash-flavor liberalism?? i’m not a Bion specialist, but I’m fairly confident that the major C20 psychoanalytic theorist of group dynamics wouldn’t recognize this kind of “what we share” universalism.

Happy 200 to George Eliot! I bang on about this all the time, but let’s just remember that the reason why people conventionally refer to Eliot as “she” is because the author of /Scenes or Clerical Life/ was outed by the most famous novelist in the UK. Eliot’s commitment to being read as a man - before Scenes, during the authorship controversy that followed its publication, and throughout the remaining two decades of productivity - resonate with the desires, identities, and ideas of so many of GE’s characters.