Devin Buckley, a feminist and philosopher who was scheduled to speak at Harvard University, was blocked by a staffer in the school’s English department who learned that she is against biological men competing against women in sports.
English department coordinator Erin Saladin reportedly found old scholarship from Buckley online that revealed she is a member of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) feminist organization, which has taken a stand on how women athletes are being erased by transgender competition.
WoLF also is in favor of women-exclusive spaces that protect vulnerable females from male intrusion, such as in prisons.
A feminist philosopher was disinvited from speaking at Harvard University for penning academic literature that pushed back on some demands of the transgender movement. https://t.co/CktSmOxRFt
— National Review (@NRO) April 25, 2022
The National Review report said the topic Buckley was going to speak about had nothing to do with the transgender issue, and was focused instead on British romanticism:
“On a more difficult note (especially for a Friday evening), I just looked up Devin Buckley so I could list the right title/affiliation on the application, and I noticed that she’s on the board of a trans-exclusionary radical feminist organization. I also found at least one piece of her writing online that explicitly denies the possibility of trans identity,” Saladin wrote in an email obtained by National Review. “I can’t ask for funding to invite a speaker who takes the public stance that trans people are dangerous or deceptive.”
“I think hosting her would signal the colloquium as a hostile place for community members who are trans. I also doubt that Deidre and Jim will want to sign onto the application asking for funding for her visit — it could look pretty bad for them and the department,” she added.
Buckley, meanwhile, said her writings have never said anything negative about transgenderism and she condemned “woke” Harvard
“I have never written anything hateful towards any transgender individual. She didn’t quote me once. She only made a number of spurious accusations,” Buckley said in the article. “My articles basically claim that a human male cannot become female and saying you’re a woman doesn’t mean you are. I simply say women deserve fair play on sports teams, they deserve to not have men in their private spaces, to not have violent men in their prisons.”
Buckley said she’s been shunned because her work doesn’t include the required narrative in academia: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“In the academic job market, they want people who study gender specifically,” Buckley said. “My work has nothing to do with fashionable topics that get people hired. So you’re implicitly disqualified if you don’t go along with the woke ideology.”
“Harvard has let me know that I cannot be a scholar of British romanticism because I do not believe there are male women,” Buckley said. “For my part, I’d rather be damned with the Romantics and Plato than go to woke heaven with Erin and the Harvard faculty.”
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