Mick Hartley

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous:

An academic has withdrawn her forthcoming book from Oxford University Press and accused the publisher of helping to launder “genocidal fascism” against trans people as apolitical philosophies.

The publisher defended its right to publish works on “a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints” after Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada, attacked it and withdrew her book on 18th-century humour.

In a blog post, she claimed the decision by the OUP to publish a second book by Holly Lawford-Smith, a gender-critical feminist from Australia, had contributed to a genocidal agenda, and that the publisher was helping to launder “transphobia”.

Zuroski claimed the OUP was publishing “hateful rhetoric while waves of anti-trans legislation are being drafted and passed in both the US and the UK, making life increasingly unlivable for trans people day by day”.

She wrote: “Honestly, it makes me sick. I cannot stomach the thought of allowing my own labours to feed a press willing to lend its reputation to ‘gender critical’ fascism.” She also pointed to research by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an American charity, which claimed the gender-critical movement “advanced a genocidal agenda through tactics that include laundering fascist ideas as apolitical ‘philosophies’”, adding: “OUP’s publication of this kind of material therefore directly contributes to this agenda by granting it scholarly credibility.”

I've posted about the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention before: it's Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice is an utter disgrace coming from a supposedly serious organisation – which has the nerve to use the name of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who escaped the Nazis and coined the term "genocide".

These people, shouting about fascist genocide, are absurd and offensive.

But then she is an academic, and she is from Canada…