'Grace'

White male privilege at its zenith

Grace Lavery has a new book out, ‘Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis’, and he needs to publicise it. Three weeks after publication it sits outside the top 150,000 in the Amazon rankings (although it is in the top 250 for ‘parody’ books) and has only two Amazon reviews (a third, negative, review has been removed).

The only attention coming Lavery’s way so far comes from his predictable withdrawal, first from the UnHerd debate with Helen Joyce, and then from a debate with Julie Bindel. Then there was the tweet that got him suspended from Twitter in which he hoped the Queen wouldn’t survive her brush with Covid. UnHerd is still looking for a ‘prominent figure from the trans community’ to step in and debate Joyce - someone who simply wants to discuss potential solutions to problems raised by ‘the gender wars’ and was labelled a fascist by Lavery for her trouble.

Despite being the most celebrated debater of all time, as he recently reminded ex-girlfriend Laurie Penny, Lavery is notably unable to define or argue a coherent position when faced with the mildest of scepticism. In this Heterodorx podcast with Corinna Cohn and Nina Paley from 2021, Lavery waffles in a non-committal way until even the friendly interviewers get frustrated by his evasiveness.

Lavery is still scheduled to take part in an event at UCL, at which he is the star attraction and will be surrounded by his fellow gender evangelists on an invitation-only basis, so presumably he won’t run away from this one. Bizarrely, the event description suggests he will blame threats against academic freedom on university administrators (eh?) and ‘powerful celebrity professors’, the latter a reference to Kathleen Stock, who was forced out of her job precisely because she tried to uphold this freedom.

As a tenured lecturer in English, critical theory and gender studies at Berkeley and a trans rights activist with a reasonable following on social media, Lavery, looking like a lifer who somehow escaped prison in a disguise, is a somewhat prominent figure who pursues notoriety in order to increase his profile. According to Berkeley’s own Facebook page, Lavery’s academic research focuses on ‘the belief that transition works – that it is truly possible to change sex.’ He famously claimed George Eliot was ‘unquestionably trans’, an assertion he later said was ‘taken wildly out of context by someone who didn’t understand my talk.’

As is the pattern with all pedlars of pseudo-intellectual postmodern theory, Lavery’s tactic on the rare occasions he puts himself in the position to be challenged is to imply that the challenger lacks the intellectual capacity to understand his work. Lavery would perhaps recommend an intense course of ‘sissy hypnosis porn’, which is on the curriculum of a course he teaches, to remedy this.

He is evidently a man who seems caught somewhere between adolescent ‘acting out’ and a full-throttle mid-life crisis (he is 39, although he claims he “marched against Thatcher”, who left office when he was seven years old). Lavery’s self-described communism seems to involve a lot of designer clothes and equipment, as displayed on Instagram. If you were ever in doubt that transgenderism is the preserve of the bourgeoisie, Lavery and company (he now has at least one girlfriend as well as the ‘husband’), will convince you.

Nobody could blame you for concluding that Lavery is essentially a troll, and he probably is. He revels in his five-o-clock shadow and unmistakably male body.

He seems to want you to have to overcome every instinct in your body to call him ‘she’. As Sarah Stuart implies in an excellent review of Lavery’s book, he is also a frustrated comedian, who experiences professional jealousy when watching panel shows. Lavery understands the comedy value of the man in the dress but he also recognises the ‘professional cachet’, as he calls it in his book, of being a ‘queer’ in academia.  

But there is a darker side to Lavery’s need for attention. In order to shock his detractors and titillate his fans, he regularly posts about his sex life, including photos of his ‘husband’ with Lavery’s fist in her mouth and with bruises.

‘Daniel’ Lavery was an established writer and founder of feminist website ‘The Toast’ when she met ‘Grace’. They both transitioned within a year or so of meeting in 2017, possibly in an effort to avoid ‘dwindling into mere heterosexuality’.

‘Daniel’ has mostly resisted Lavery’s stated objective to ‘Yoko’ her (a reference to the legend that Yoko Ono destroyed John Lennon’s career), which is the focus of a blog post called ‘Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Yoko’. According to the New York Times, ‘Daniel’ accepted a $430,000 contract from Substack, dwarfing Lavery’s $125,000 advance, which reportedly included a 12-month contract to post on Substack. Just hours after the 12 months were up, Lavery left Substack, stating that it continues to offer a platform to voices, particularly Graham Linehan’s, he claims are ‘abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, libellous’, as per Substack’s terms of service. ‘Daniel’, however, continues to publish on Substack, presumably generating money to fund Lavery’s lifestyle, and achieves vastly more engagement than her ‘wife’ managed.

Perhaps in response to ‘Daniel’s’ resistance to Lavery’s attempts at Yoko’ing, Lavery has become openly infatuated with other people, including a new girlfriend. He now uses the ‘queer’ text-based dating app, Lex, to procure partners to have sex with his girlfriend while he watches, or to advertise for partners on whom to take out his current frustration.

Grace is seen as a liability by some in the trans activist community because of behaviour such as this, and his original willingness to debate gender with gender critical thinkers. His lack of self-control also means he often says the quiet bit out loud.

One minute of watching Lavery on YouTube will reveal exactly what he is: a posh, white man who seems to enjoy making other people feel uncomfortable. Incredibly, the people in society who are ostensibly opposed to this kind of absentminded display of privilege fawn over him because he says he identifies as a woman. But behind the intellectual veneer lies very little of any actual substance. He does at least have the ability to recognise that using an incoherent ideology to debate Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel would not have worked out well for him.