The New York Public Library cancelled a panel on cancelled women

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) is no stranger to controversy, but it was still a bit of a surprise to have their New York event on Cancelled Women cancelled by the New York Public Library (NYPL). The event is going ahead, and if you’re in New York tonight you should come check it out, but you’ll have to reserve a ticket to find out where.

Women always find a way to get around barriers put in place to keep them out, and women who have been locked out in one way or another are more than capable of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and starting again.

In this case, the event, An Evening with Cancelled Women, was booked into a room at the New York Public Library. All was moving along as planned, until the night before the deposit was due, WoLF Board Chair Natasha Chart received an email from the NYPL saying that the booking was cancelled. No reason was given. And the irony, of course, is plain: an event about cancelled women was cancelled.

It will never cease to amaze me how threatened people are by women, getting together in libraries, to talk. Drag queens in full costume reading to and occasionally flashing children is fine, but women talking about their experiences? Absolutely not.

Libraries in Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto have been protested for hosting talks by gender critical feminists, but those libraries have not caved to pressure the way the NYPL has. As a long-time lover of the NYPL, its beautiful research and reading rooms, its exhibits, history, massive archive, and dedication to scholarship, this was both hugely disappointing and surprising.

The root of all this is the continued divide in feminism over whether or not biological sex is a fantastical concept, or simply an unalterable aspect of reality. Transgender ideology has taken hold of our culture and it refuses to let go. But the truly crazy thing is that most people don’t actually believe that surgeries, hormone treatments, and wishing really hard can change your sex. Instead, people just say that they do in order to not hurt trans people’s feelings.

The women who will be featured at the event include Dominique Christina, Posie Parker, Meghan Murphy, Linda Bellos, Natasha Chart, and myself. All of these women are outspoken about their unwillingness to accept trans women as women, balk at the term cis, refuse to allow women’s spaces to be overrun with men, and reveal the truth about the butchering being done to children in the name of transgender lies.

They have been harassed and derided for these views before, and for the most part would rather not have to talk about it all the time. But so much of women’s experience is being erased under the guise of trans acceptance. Language about women and women’s bodies is being altered to include male-bodied persons—pregnant woman is now pregnant person, the word mother is now an identity and not a verb, even menstrual products are being rebranded to eliminate references to women. Women’s sports are inclusive of men who say they are women, leading to men winning women’s championship titles in cycling, track & field, and that’s just the beginning, as the IOC has opened the doors for trans women to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Women are expected to sit back and quietly take it, whatever is thrown at them, to acquiesce, to give in, and they are threatened when they don’t. These women have proven that they will not be silenced, and the more people that want them to shut up, the louder they will speak. Erasing and cancelling women may be the going trend, but we’re not going to accept it just because trans activists want us to.