An organization called Gender Critical Vermont has canceled a public discussion about “the unforeseen consequences of the transgender agenda,” saying planned protests would make for an unsafe environment.
The event had been set for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington.
Critics caught wind of the event and vowed to protest the discussion they considered to be an attack on transgender people and their rights.
“The response of the transgender activist community in Burlington follows a familiar pattern of eroding the principles of free speech and rational discussion,” Gender Critical Vermont wrote in an email Monday afternoon announcing the cancelation.
Peggy Luhrs, a Burlington resident and lesbian activist since the 1970s, is one of the founders of the group and was scheduled to speak at the event. She told Seven Days the decision to cancel is only temporary.
“We will reschedule,” Luhrs said. “We’re going to look for a bigger venue, we’re going to look for a place where we can have security. There’s just no point in having a screaming match.”
According to a statement from Fletcher Free Library director Mary Danko, Gender Critical Vermont reserved a library meeting room for the purposes of hosting a “discussion group for Vermonters who oppose the subversion of Women’s Rights by the transgender agenda.”
The library consulted with the Burlington City Attorney’s Office and concluded the event fell within library guidelines for reserving space and should be allowed, Danko wrote in the statement, which was posted Monday to the library’s website.
“Public libraries have always been organizations that vigorously try to uphold the tenets of free speech on which our country was built. We have fought censorship on many levels, including efforts to ban books that occur still to this day,” Danko wrote.
Critics of the event equated the planned discussion to hate speech and questioned why the city’s public library would allow it to take place.
Is the institution “truly abiding by their standards and directives of not promoting hate speech and violence?” asked Taylor Small, a trans woman who serves as director of health and wellness at the Pride Center of Vermont.
Dana Kaplan, the executive director at Outright Vermont, said he got calls from parents all over Vermont who were concerned that the library was hosting the event.
“I think that there are a lot of folks in our community who feel extreme relief that the event is canceled,” said Kaplan, who is trans.
There’s no trans agenda trying to subvert women’s rights, Kaplan added. The trans agenda, he said, is “of gender liberty where everybody gets to be themselves, and I feel that that is also a feminist agenda.
“I don’t understand the pitting against each other,” Kaplan said. “We’ve got a lot of bigger issues to focus on.”
Luhrs said the group is not a hate group nor was it going to use hate speech. The discussion was titled, “What are the unforeseen consequences of the Transgender agenda?” The description read: “If you are a Woman, Gay Man, Lesbian, Child or Parent, or cherish Free Thought/Speech, you have a stake in this conversation!”
“I’m not a transphobe. I don’t hate trans people,” Luhrs said. “This is about protecting women’s rights and lesbian rights. “
For example, she said, lesbians are often told “they are transphobic if they won’t consider trans women as partners,” even when the trans women have male genitalia.
Luhrs said she also planned to talk about how the trans movement could be hurtful to women’s sports and could undermine laws such as Title IX.
She wanted to discuss her opposition to puberty blocking hormones and gender reassignment surgery for people under the age of 18. Adults should be free to make those choices, but a “wait-and-see” approach is better for minors, Luhrs said.
Ultimately, the medical interventions don’t change her opinion that gender is fixed at birth. “I believe you can’t really change sex,” Luhrs said. “You can pretend you can, but you can’t.”
Trans activists immediately shut down any challenge by labeling opposing views as hate speech, she added.
“This is totally Orwellian as far as I’m concerned,” Luhrs said, adding: “I have never seen so much authoritarianism from the left, except maybe Stalin.”
“I’m a longtime, very out lesbian, and I have no problem with gender nonconforming people,” she continued, “but I have a problem with a certain group that is trying to make all the rules their way.”
The discussion has yet to be rescheduled, Luhrs said.
The debate made its way to the Burlington City Council on Monday night, when Councilor Perri Freeman (P-Central District) introduced a resolution affirming the rights of trans people and condemning discrimination.
“The City of Burlington acknowledges and supports the existence of transgender and nonbinary individuals in our community and supports their rights and freedom to live openly, without fear of retribution,” reads the resolution, which passed unanimously. The city also “condemns any bigotry, hate speech, and exclusionary spaces that are hostile toward the very existence of transgender people.”
Despite the cancelation, two counter-events are still scheduled for Tuesday. From 6:30 to 8 p.m., Burlington resident Laura Hale has reserved the Fletcher Room at the library — next to the room that Gender Critical Vermont had reserved.
Hale’s event will include conversation, art and reading.
‘The intent is to celebrate the queer and trans community in Burlington,” said Hale, who is married to a trans woman.
Outright will host a letter-writing “heck yeah” event. Supporters are invited to visit the nonprofit’s office at 241 North Winooski Avenue in Burlington from 1 to 4 p.m. and write letters of affirmation to Vermont’s trans youth. Kaplan will then ask Fletcher Free Library to display them. Supporters can also email notes to info@outrightvt.org.
Reporter Courtney Lamdin contributed to this story.
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I am a proud gay man and fighter for Womens Equality and LGBTQ Equality.. Can these Gender Critical people not hear that their arguments are just wolf whistles from the alt-right against gays and lesbians? You have moved so far left you are in the alt-right. The Conservative/Liberal political line is a circle not a straight line, as any decent Political Scientist will tell you. Gender Critical, you need to look at yourselves with clear eyes.You sound like Trump.
The problem here is that a talk is cancelled due to threats of violence solely in regard to the subject. It is shameful that folks will threaten violence to squelch opposing views. Shame.
As a non-binary person living in Vermont, I would like to send my sincere thanks to the Burlington City Council for their acknowledgement and support of transgender and non-binary people in Burlington and for their thoughtful resolution to protect our freedom to exist free of hate and harassment within their community. I am grateful to live in a wonderful place that considers the negative impact of hate groups like Gender Critical and supports trans rights through both words and actions. Thank you, Vermonters!
This whole thing is interesting to me because in the case of trans people’s place in the broader political and social context of LGBTQ identity and civil rights, I suspect there may be some uniquely legitimate reasons to revisit how the aims and struggles of various subgroups within the “community” align and intersect (this is not a new discussion, as far as I know; just bringing together the L and G under one social umbrella has been a long, fraught project from the beginning).
I can completely understand (whether or not I agree with) a negative feminist critique of trans identity politics; cis-womens’ experiences as cis-women are bound to be different from trans-womens’ experiences as trans-women. I can also understand why any vocal opposition to someone’s way of constructing or defining their gender identity can be threatening. I can understand mutual competition for resources and social capital. But I do not understand the knee-jerk reaction to the use of public resources. I’m not sure how one hopes to negotiate peace in a shared social and political space without allowing people to voice their views openly. Beyond the basic principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all”, which is a nice platitude but far from universally upheld, sometimes it’s necessary to tolerate people airing widely diverging views in public. Kind of a cornerstone of enlightened civil society, y’know?
Unless one just needs to be RIGHT for one’s own sense of self-righteousness, or afraid to be wrong because adulting is hard. In those cases, nobody can help ye – have fun being a source of misery for the rest of the world, I guess…
As a transgender woman who stays away from political frays and so called agendas. I’m remain unswayed by both sides of the argument. Having been born in the mid 50s into a family of six boys, expressing my feelings at age 4 to my mum. Being chastised, then told no more thinking of the kind, we will keep this a secret.
The most devastating days ensued. I had become nothing. Invisible and sub human.
The carried in until my late teens when overwhelmingly I never stopped feeling as expressed as a child.
Both sides here will never hear from me or have my support. I will as I have since age 19 live my life, go about my days doing what every other human being on this planet does making their way through life.
We are not defined by our gender or who we love. Recalling the day I began transitioning, short time later what Rights I lost upon transition. Having to have earned those Rights back not through agendas or arguments. Simply living and allowing my actions and self define me.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends towards justice. As is always true, that arc and history itself leaves many people and their ideas behind.
Many among us yearn for simpler times, when the gender universe consisted of women (June Cleaver – always in heels and pearls!) and the men who oppress them (Ward Cleaver, Eddie Haskell, occasionally the Beav in Seasons 5 and 6).
The LGB consonant troika reigned supreme back in the day, and none dared utter “I’d like to buy a consonant, Peggy, and solve the puzzle.”
Liberal (permissive) approaches to free speech in public library settings tend to help all sorts of progressive causes more than they hurt them.
Librarians tend toward the political left as much or more than any people in education-adjacent fields; however, they also tend to be more resistant to censoring/silencing any ideas (even hate speech) than is currently popular in left/progressive circles, because doing so is in direct contradiction to their code of professional ethics. In the long view, this is a good thing – if you disagree based on this particular case, take a look at the “most challenged library books” in libraries and you will quickly see that it is disproportionately populated by attempts to censor/silence LGBTQ voices that librarians have fought hard to make available in their collections.
Librarians resist censorship, and it takes a damn good reason (like direct incitements to / threats of physical violence) to convince them it is OK to forbid an idea from the library. The public may – in some indirect way – be librarians’ “bosses”; however, they are professionals hired to do a job and, when they uphold their rigorous commitment to free speech, even against their personal objections or community sensitivities, they are doing it well.
I support Councillor Freeman”s resolution affirming the rights of trans people and opposition to discrimination. There is a problem with the rest of the resolution because transactivists define hate speech as any speech that disagrees with their newly minted ideology.
Our local Peace and Justice Center called 3 patrol cars to the Echo Center to keep me from attending an event celebrating a woman I’ve worked with for decades due to what they called violence and hate speech. I went to a meeting with their Board and demanded to know what violence I had committed and their only response was that I had complained about the lack of feminist books on their Gender Studies shelf and said you don’t seem to care about women. I was not complaining about the presence of books by and for transgender folks only that there were barely any books by all the major feminist writers and thinkers in a place where I previously bought a lot of books.
Gender Critical Vermont was formed to break the monopoly of speech on this issue and encourage a look at where this is taking the LGB community and how it affects women’s hard-fought rights. I also don’t think her resolution should be telling people who they may meet with. In addition to free speech, we are also constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association.
“I believe you can’t really change sex,” Luhrs said. “You can pretend you can, but you can’t.”
‘Pretend’ is the key word and it also appears to be the trigger word in this particular beef between the parties.