I went to the Grace Lavery event at Edinburgh University last night.
I’m going to use names and pronouns that people choose for themselves because I’m not stupid.
I was taking surreptitious notes on my phone, which I then filled in as soon as possible afterwards before memories faded. All quotations are approximate.
There were two security guards? - people in red Ed Uni jackets. They mostly wandered around in front of the door of the lecture room while attendees went in. One of them later sat by the fire escape door, in case we needed to escape from a fire.
I’d assumed this event was organised by the English Literature department, but it seems to have been a joint event between the uni’s Staff Pride Network and Lighthouse Books, which is a nearby radical bookshop.
About 60 people in the audience. Not as many vibrant hair choices as I would have expected - one bright pink, one clownish orange (appropriate, given the clown metaphors in Grace’s memoir), one man-bun, and one person with a full beard and a gorgeous flowing set of locks. Lots of people wore their university staff cards on rainbow lanyards. A mix of ages - it wasn’t just students; plenty of people my mum would refer to as ‘mature’.
Pre-set music: something funky I walked out humming. Wish I knew what it was.
Grace originally wore a grey wrap thing, but took it off before the event properly started, and was then in a black t-shirt, baggy black trousers, and very pink trainers. Felt like the arm tattoos were being showcased. In general, Grace looked and sounded like a genial bloke who had longish hair.
Danny mostly sat off to the side with a friend of theirs named Cliff. Wore a striped button-down shirt. Has a dad bod. Heard him speaking briefly before the event started, and he didn’t sound particularly masculine, though I don’t know what his original speaking voice was like.
Brief intro from a pride network member, and then over to a Lighthouse Books person who introduced herself as Lindsey and her pronouns were she/her. Let us just say that Lindsey was not originally called she/her.
Grace didn’t write the biography that’s on her book; her editor did. And she doesn’t know whether her editor deliberately capitalised ‘Muppet’ as an homage to Jim Henson or something.
Grace is ambivalent about the word ‘transition’. Feels that recovery memoirs and transition memoirs (her book is both) are usually boring. ‘Everything was complicated and then it got simple.’ She wants new and creative ways of telling the story that are not straightforward.
Told a story that she’s only told to this particular audience on her book tour - one time when she was in Edinburgh, after drinking all night, she was at the McDonald’s on Princes Street around 6am and stole what she thought was a box of breakfast hash browns. She legged it back to the flat she was staying in, intending to cook all these hash browns for her flatmates, only to discover she’d actually stolen a box of Happy Meal toys - and the worst possible kind, stupid Purple Ronnie plastic things. [It’s a stupid cartoon character you can buy on greeting cards and plastic tat.] “This is a nightmare. I can’t cook them, how do I get rid of them?” Spent three hours (presumably whilst hungover) getting rid of the toys by putting them in small amounts in different public bins, rather than just dumping the lot of them all at once.
Grace was easygoing and comfortable with the audience. Somehow got onto a tangent about Philadelphia, where she lived for five years, and was swapping ‘where did you live’ questions with an audience member who was from there. You can absolutely tell she’s a university lecturer, from the way she can talk at length about literature off the cuff, and throw out phrases like ‘Trans women’s bodies have become a site of contention’. Honestly, from what I heard, I suspect she’s a good lecturer, if you like the sort of thing she lectures about.
She mentions goblins - maybe in the excerpt she’s reading? - and goes on a brief tangent about how she and Danny and their friend Cliff went to the Edinburgh Dungeons (touristy place, immersive experience into the darker side of life in historical Scotland, with similar ones in York and London, good place for acting students to work in so they wear historical costume and scream bloody murder on command 18 times a day for tourists who mostly don’t speak English), and said ‘oooh, goblets’ in ye olde gift shoppe, and somehow that turned into a catchphrase of ‘oooh, goblins’.
Gave a reading from the book which was a riff on…Mars Attacks? Species? Some movie where a blond sexy alien woman appears on earth. She notes that every part of the book is different, so whatever part she reads, the audience will think all the book is like that.
The whiteboard at the front of the room had a URL where you could submit questions for Grace, but this was never referred to and no one’s questions were answered, except for three people: two who were pre-selected, one of whom was the current trans and non-binary rep for the pride network, the other the person with the beard and to-die-for hair, and a third person at the very end who was randomly chosen and asked some BORING question about the book will inform Grace’s academic work. What a waste.
Oscar Wilde is a genius who never wrote a good book.
Says she wouldn’t have written this book before she got tenure. She’s going for a full professorship this year on the basis of her second academic publication, not this memoir. Her teaching load is three classes a year. She also has a generous research account (for which she thanks former California governor Jerry? Brown). She loves her colleagues, but spends less time in the faculty lounge these days, and more time in committee meetings with queer people (? - did not write down why this is so).
She recorded Women’s Hour today and it will be aired on Thursday. She was asked (more than once?) during the recording ‘do you think a woman can have a penis?’ (Several people in the audience LITERALLY GASPED IN HORROR.) Grace rejected the entire premise and was then asked ‘can you understand why someone else would take a different view?’ which she felt was…I don’t think she used the phrase ‘trick question’ but that’s how she seems to have interpreted it, since answering either yes or no would have been conceding something.
Referred to death threats, and the photographs of her and her husband having sex being sent to her boss and her mum. (This received murmurs of horror.)
She claims being kicked off Twitter was a good thing and stated outright that she hopes the queen dies. Some laughter and applause at that.
Acknowledged her tendency towards self-aggrandisement more than once; tied this to being an alcoholic and drug addict. Cited Danny and Cliff as ‘way smarter than me’.
‘I was terrified to come to the UK to do this tour.’ Afraid she’d be confronted by people who were carrying placards that showed the sex photos (!!!). BUT! She has in fact met only one GC person, a sweet old lady in Manchester who wrote her a note saying she was afraid she couldn’t use the word ‘woman’ anymore.
She says there’s less aggression (towards queer people) on the streets of Edinburgh than in Brooklyn.
Why is the world as depicted on social media so different from real life? Aha, the answer is that the GC viewpoint dominates the centre-left media! Some crack at Hadley Freeman (Guardian columnist). ‘It’s a columnist thing’, Grace concludes.
She openly said that if there were any LGB Alliance people in the room, they were welcome, and please ask questions. (I pause in my transcription to laugh at this.)
‘Maybe they care less about me than they did before they got me kicked off Twitter.’ (I now pause to wonder why people genuinely believe it was the big bad GCs who caused Grace’s Twitter account to be suspended and not, say, the fact that she made a statement that was against Twitter’s rules and was thus subject to the enforcement of those rules. I suppose victimhood at the hands of GCs is required.)
She used to walk 20 miles a day, back when she lived in Oakland, and did a lot of her writing on her phone during those walks. ‘I don’t do that [walking 20 miles a day] anymore’, she says, smacking her large stomach.
Applause for her mum’s love of Comic Sans.
She refers to JK Rowling, I did not note the context, as the ‘hometown queen’ and then some would-be wag in the audience cries, ‘How many queens do you wish would die?’ But NO, Grace does NOT want JKR to DIE; she wants JKR to give away all her money to homeless trans kids.
Ends by asking why Edinburgh smells so beautiful. (Er, we have good air quality, and there are some parts of the city that smell like breweries.)
