Source: Women are Human
US — Berkeley, California. Believers in the gender identity faith are openly advocating destruction of Abigail Shrier’s intellectual work, the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which holds a critical lens to gender identity theory’s influence and effects on young girls.
On November 13, 2020, Grace Lavery, a transgender-identifying Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, tweeted: “what we could do is find copies of Abigail Shrier’s book IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE in our local libraries, rip out the interiors without consent, and install the texts of our own propaganda before sewing the jacket back up. stop this rubbish from reproducing itself.”
Some of Mr Lavery’s followers contributed ideas on how they could help destroy the books.
@thekateblack offered, “Grace, I’m in Brooklyn and literally have a gallon jug of archival glue from my bookbinding days.”
In the face of inquiry and criticism about his position, Mr Lavery clarified the following day,
“Since some ppl have misunderstood my tone, and censorship is an important matter and as a public educator I have a duty to be precise, let me clarify:
I do NOT advocate defacing library books.
I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.
Plz [please] make sure you use a safe pyre, and that you have an extinguisher to hand. Be safe, when you are burning books.
Remember: all you’re doing is removing a commodity from circulation—much as one might destroy a contaminated crop, or take action if a distributor failed to do so.“
Mr Lavery’s call to burn copies of Ms Shrier’s book has thus far received a thousand ‘likes’.
The idea to destroy the books appears to have been sparked after Mr Lavery encouraged his followers to steal copies of Irreversible Damage and “[photograph] themselves putting their pinky finger in the hole like what phalloplasty is, i will post hole.” Twitter user @fite_heron, a self-described “poet, translator” responded, “grace are you daring me to engage in my pastime of altering fashy books at stores” – to which Mr Lavery wryly replied, “as a public educator i couldn’t possibly encourage you to go into a store.”
@fite_heron claimed to always carry a “big fat sharpie” to facilitate a hobby of destroying books, and even tweeted a detailed account of regularly defacing colleagues’ dissertations and theses at the library. This inspired Mr Lavery to urge his followers to engage in subversive tactics to remove Ms Shrier’s books from circulation.
“If you are a public educator, you should probably retire,” one man pointed out to Mr Lavery. “Education should be about teaching kids how to think instead of what to think.”
Several tweeters accused Mr Lavery and his devoted followers of engaging in fascist action, despite identifying as “anti-fascist” or “antifa” in their bios. A woman tweeted, “The nazis would be so proud of you, just as cowardly and controlling, fearing knowledge and dissent and hiding it behind a sanctimonious front, it makes me shed a tear.” Twitter blocked one of Mr Lavery’s tweets calling for book damage from displaying in Germany.
“The unifying factor between all types of purposeful book-burners in the 20th century, [Rebecca] Knuth says, is that the perpetrators feel like victims, even if they’re the ones in power.“
Smithsonian Mag
According to Smithsonian Magazine, book-burners have targeted books and libraries worldwide for thousands of years. Book-burners’ motivation is often either to destroy material that may contradict their religious beliefs, or to centralize and control thought during times of conquest or political upheaval.
The magazine notes that some of the most famous book-burnings were “those staged by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis,” who were also experts at framing language; Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution following takeover of China, which saw “any book that didn’t conform to party propaganda” destroyed; and Sinhalese Buddhists’ recent burning of 100,000 books from the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka to quell the perceived threat of Hinduism from the Tamils they outnumber.
Jonathan Zimmerman at the Chicago Tribune argued in a op-ed this week, “When censorship wins, minorities lose.” He said the movement by transgender activists to censor Irreversible Damage would ultimately backfire and hurt minority, marginalized and oppressed groups:
“Once you establish that some ideas are simply too harmful to be aired, you clear the way for other people to make the same claim. And one day, they’ll come after you. That’s why every great warrior for social justice in our history — including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. — was also a champion of free speech. Without that right, people at the bottom of our society can’t critique the wrongs they have suffered.“
Mr Lavery demured after the University of California, Berkeley was inundated with complaints to fire the book-burning advocate from his teaching position, and again after Campus Reform published a story about his tweets. Mr Lavery now insists his words were never intended to be taken literally.
