Devin Buckley had prepared a highly specialized talk on British romanticism ‘that had nothing to do with gender or transgenderism.’
A feminist philosopher was disinvited from speaking at Harvard University for penning academic literature that pushed back on some demands of the transgender movement.
Dr. Devin Buckley had prepared a highly specialized talk on British romanticism “that had nothing to do with gender or feminism,” she told National Review, until coordinator Erin Saladin of the college’s English Department unearthed some of her scholarship on the Internet. She discovered that Buckley is a board member of Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a radical feminist organization that has been outspoken about maintaining sex segregation in women-exclusive spaces to protect vulnerable females. Because of this involvement, Saladin determined that Buckley was a guest for whom the department could not provide a platform.
“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.
The guest lecture was a paid opportunity for which she would have received an honorarium payment, Harvard-reimbursed plane and hotel fare, and free meals, Buckley said. She vehemently rejected the characterization of her writings.
“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 of the event coordinator.
In the articles deemed objectionable by Harvard, Buckley defended biological reality and the immutable characteristics that separate the male and female sexes.
“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 added.
While Harvard’s cancellation was disappointing, Buckley said she knows the risk of being punished for her views, especially in her niche field. “I would like to go to law school because I know I will not get an appointment in academia. I was warned by faculty that I will not get a job based on my views, ideology, even methodology,” she said.
As a scholar who studies philosophical theology within the Romantic period in England, Buckley’s work is not deemed en vogue if it doesn’t incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion, she 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,” she said.
“I’ve been shunned and ostracized by people at my graduate program. I’ve had people walk down the street refusing to acknowledge that I exist in ritualized shunning and social cancellation. I’ve been called a fascist before,” Buckley added.
Some Harvard graduate students in the English department had initially taken an interest in Buckley’s work because of how unique her research was, namely the “interventions” she had made in her field by challenging certain readings of poets, she claims. But because of the progressive protestations, she was denied the chance to share her intellectual contributions at Harvard.
“If it is unacceptable for me to speak at Harvard on British poetry and philosophy because I am a feminist, then I invite Harvard to purge its libraries and museums of all those who hold views unacceptable to Harvard. If I am to be silenced, then why do the tomes and treatises of history’s innumerable sexist, racist, homophobes still sit on Harvard’s hallowed shelves and continue to be cited with reverence? Harvard should cleanse them all and leave nothing but the purity of empty space,” Buckley wrote in a statement responding to the school.
“Considering that many scholars at Harvard and elsewhere are celebrated for their activism both within and without their scholarship, while I am condemned for it, it’s clear that the fact that I am an activist or a polemicist is not the issue, but what I am an activist about. Harvard has let me know that I cannot be a scholar of British Romanticism because I do not believe there are male women,” she 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.”