Dr Holly Lawford-Smith is an associate professor of political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Holly is a women’s rights activist and creator of the website, NoConflictTheySaid.org, which seeks to gather anecdotal evidence of the ways in which sex self-identification impacts women. As a result of the website launch, Holly has been targeted by her colleagues, who penned an open letter to university administrators denouncing her as transphobic. In addition, over the weekend of April 2nd, trans activists staged a protest on campus condemning her and the site.

Holly Lawford-Smith - No Conflict, They Said

Dr Holly Lawford-Smith, radical feminist and associate professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, reads her philosophical essay, Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional Pathways arguing for the abolition of gender stereotypes, sometimes also referred to as sex roles. First published in Philosophia in November 2020.  Abstract: From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes to gender? In this paper, I'll compare four 'transitional pathways', with a view to considering how each relates to the ultimate end of ending sex-based oppression. Should we open the doors to the cages, so that people can move freely between them, but leave the cages themselves in place? (Transgender pathway). Should we add more cages? (Nonbinary pathway). Should we make the cages bigger, so that people have a lot more room to move around inside them? Or should we dismantle the cages, so there are no more genders at all? (Gender abolitionist pathways). Some of these options are ‘gender revisionist’, others are gender abolitionist. I'll argue in favour of a gender abolitionist pathway.

Ending Sex-Based Oppression - Dr Holly Lawford-Smith

The École Polytechnique massacre, also known as the Montreal massacre, was an anti-feminist mass shooting at an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal. On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine entered a mechanical engineering class at the École Polytechnique and ordered the women and men to opposite sides of the classroom. He separated nine women, instructing the men to leave. He stated that he was "fighting feminism" and opened fire. He shot at all nine women in the room, killing six. The shooter then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, targeting women for just under 20 minutes. He killed a further eight women before turning the gun on himself.

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