The New York Public Library was scheduled to be the venue tomorrow (January 17) for a discussion led by a group of feminists who describe themselves as “Cancelled Women," who claim that they have faced opposition because they have “have refused to be silenced by the authoritarian Left.”
But then the NYPL cancelled the event, making the women doubly cancelled, and effectively silencing them until they can find another place to hold the event.
What was the problem?
The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which was sponsoring the event, is a radical organization, but it is critical of recent trends, including the glorification of the trans movement. David Marcus reports in the New York Post:
In a blog post, the WLF’s Natasha Chart recounted how she was informed last week, just a day before the deposit for the room rental was due, that the library wouldn’t be hosting the event. The library gave no reason for the cancellation — which came even though earlier it had assured the women that “the contract was in process.” The NYPL didn’t respond to my request for comment.
The only plausible explanation is that the NYPL fears backlash from trans activists. That is, the women are being denied a platform over their objections to trans ideology.
At a time when our society is radically reengineering our conception of sex and gender — with policy decisions that will have profound ramifications on women’s sports, prisons and homeless shelters, among other issues — the decision to silence these women is flat-out shameful.
WoLF described itself in the promotional material for the event as “a radical feminist organization dedicated to the total liberation of all women.” The groups says:
We are now living in a time of vicious backlash against feminism. A growing wave of misogyny from the Left is celebrating prostitution, normalizing sexual sadism, re-stigmatizing lesbians, and gleefully erasing women in language and law. The consequences to anyone who speaks out are swift and severe, from deplatforming to death threats. Canceled Women will feature an evening of women who have refused to be silenced by the authoritarian Left.
One of the speakers was to be Posie Parker, who according to the invitation, was to speak out against "the mutilation of children’s bodies through 'transgender' medical interventions."
Well, apparently, you can't say that.
Marcus concludes:
This is what progressivism has come to: Feminists have to hide to speak freely.
In very short order, the academy, the media and the government have simply decided to overturn thousands of years of the understanding of gender, without so much as a discussion about it. Many on the left hold the view that speech critical of gender ideology is literally an act of violence. A free society can’t survive such absurd nonsense.