Lubrication, faux concern for the kids, a jibe at JK Rowling (natch) and a really weird plug for K-pop smut.
(Our resident artiste may have had a little bit of trouble with one of the hands, otherwise, I think we can agree, it’s a true facsimile.)
The blurby bit
The annual Philippa Pearce Lecture celebrates excellence in literature for children. It has become a prestigious platform for the very best children’s authors, poets and illustrators to reflect on their art and share their insights. Consistently thought-provoking and inspiring, the lecture is now a landmark on the children’s literature event calendar.
From the organiser’s blurb at the event
On Juno Dawson
The only book I have ever read and reviewed of Juno Dawson’s, is the train wreck that is What’s the T?: The no-nonsense guide to all things trans and/or non-binary for teens. Needless to say, the ‘guide’ is as bad as it gets, giving out wrong information and treating the issue of puberty blockers as if they were no bad thing.
Whether Dawson is an okay novelist, I am yet to judge, but Meat Market is waiting on my shelf, a young adult novel what he won a prize for (actually the YA Book Prize).
Prior to identifying as female, Juno Dawson (as James) celebrated (sort of) being a gay man, and is currently married to the same. Since ‘transition’, he has become a vocal supporter of charities which peddle the myth of the ‘transgender child’. In particular, he has supported Mermaids, being one their headline acts for its 2020 DigiFest (I know because I watched). He is currently patron for Not a Phase, which describes itself as a Trans+ charity for adults, which had quite a presence at the Good Law Project’s recent Trans Mission event, as did Dawson himself. Despite claiming to be adult-focussed, Not a Phase published a video stating that ‘puberty blockers are reversible, puberty isn’t’.
The room
The audience was almost all women and a good chunk senior in years, otherwise students. It was said that the event was popular with industry people but this turned out not to be the case on straw poll. I rather got the impression they were local, come out for an afternoon natter and the free post-event drinks reception. Either way, the overall vibe was definitely politely miffed, so I suspect most weren’t aware of Juno Dawson’s oeuvre. And, despite Dawson making a fleeting reference to being trans, it was never made clear otherwise, certainly not by the host, so it’s fair to say that a less observant person might not have realised this was a trans activist in their midst.
The introduction
The chair of the Philippa Pearce lecture committee gave Dawson his introduction, dutifully referring to him as ‘she’ and ‘her’ but with no mention of the T-word. The lecture series hopes to celebrate the best of what was happening in children’s literature at the current time. Next year’s guest speaker is Mr. P. Ness, no less, who supported John Boyne’s removal from the Polari Prize because of ‘transphobia’, so clearly the committee is going full woke.
Dawson’s listed achievements included writing for Doctor Who. Odd, given the series has been on life support for donkeys. His other major credential was that he had been a teacher. Dawson had also ‘graciously’ given an interview prior to the lecture – see here. There was also a gushing review of the lecture, published immediately post event.
The Death of Reading for Pleasure and How to Prevent It
Bad jokes
Okay, my first complaint is that Dawson claimed to have only written the speech the day before. No, just no. No, you did not write your fucking speech only the day before, Dawson. Not possible. What a lie! Second complaint – okay, not really a complaint, more just noting how utterly predictable a TIM is – an ill-judged joke (for that audience) about lubricant. Dear reader, we were just two minutes in.
Happily the advent of the speech had come just a few days before his next young adult novel was due for release. It’s called Survival Show, but he was worried about it flopping. His fandom were witchy millennial women who love the Spice Girls, who reliably buy his books in the first week and thus ensure he charts (meaning he wasn’t really worried at all).
Dawson, having been away from the Young Adult genre for some time, once again found himself ‘an anonymous woman, asking a 13 year old to read a book.’ During that time, social media had exploded and the culture was very different. How could we get Dawson’s book sales off to a good start?
Yes, I know he was joking, but revealing nonetheless, and a joke that J. K. Rowling need never make. Also worth pointing out that it bombed, coming as it did, after the two other clangers.
Concerned about what the research shows …
Statistics were quoted from the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey – see here. (Around 120,000 children were surveyed but, crucially, only 515 schools participated, i.e. a tiny fraction of UK schools. I could find little else regarding the methodology.) Anyway, the point here isn’t to debate whether or not the statistics he presented were accurate, it’s the curious position that children reading much less is of any worry at all, given that Dawson has closely aligned himself with Mermaids, which promotes the use of puberty blockers. These drugs are known to literally arrest brain development, cause bone thinning and permanent infertility, therefore hearing Dawson opine the disaster of children not reading daily was simply strange.
[To] that one gender critical person who has come here to write about me on the internet, I’d like to think that even we can agree, that children should be reading.
Juno Dawson, to that one gender critical person
Ooh, Juno, I felt so seen. Seriously though, it’s easy to agree on the axiomatic, is it not? And children not taking off-label chemotherapy drugs for identity confusion should be an even more straightforward agreement. No?
Dawson is also extremely concerned that we do not force children to read if they don’t want to, as it could be ‘traumatic’. However, he then went on to tell us of all the super amazing brain- and mental health benefits children get from reading and thus unwittingly made it sound like it was something we absolutely should force them to do. Again, the trans activist rubbishing of medical research loomed large in my mind and yet here Dawson was straight-up telling the room to trust the research. Would the ladies later tell their families about the nice trans lady who was very very concerned about the mental development of children? Was that the point? I doan geddit.
Another interesting comment, was Dawson saying that parents should never be guilt-tripped on the matter. An out of sync comment when you consider the propaganda trans activism spouts to parents who urge caution on issues with regards to gender transition. Would there be no end to Dawson’s hypocrisy?
On being trans
Dawson fleetingly mentioned that he had come out as trans in 2013, and since then he had ‘really really felt politician’s fingers, all in my business,’ – boom, tish. Then – scandalised – ‘there are people in Westminster making decisions about our lives, all of us.’ Naturally, ‘some of us feel those fingers, a lot more than others,’ an unnecessary double entendre and was met as such. Dawson blamed the government for the supposed downturn in reading and felt that throwing (taxpayer) money at it was the answer.
Bashing social media
Undermining his own arguments about the effects of poverty and austerity – ‘they’ve always been around’ – Dawson then wanted to bash social media (arguably one of the main causes of rapid onset gender dysphoria and autogynephilia in adults). People were spending too much time looking at their phones! How do we get kids off their devices? Shock, horror! -social media companies designed their apps to be addictive. Dawson was very concerned that, over the last few years, we have been giving children a highly addictive piece of technology. Which must explain why he has no presence on social media (just joking, he regularly posts on Instagram, the least literate of all SM apps).
Juno [Dawson] describes her identity as a gay man as a ‘personal misdiagnosis’, and believes that it is a more common phenomenon than one may think. “I think that there are a lot of gay men in the world who had the same personal misdiagnosis, because we didn’t have the information that we have now,” she says. “I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn’t be women. That was certainly true of me.”
Source: https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/world/muslim-drag-queen-asifa-lahore-comes-out-as-trans-292699/
Interestingly, Dawson again turned to research to illustrate his argument. It’s been proved, said he, that using social media can cause nausea, headache, difficulty reading, poor appetite and raised blood pressure (blame the trolls for that one). People experienced withdrawal symptoms when they came off it. Again, this is a weird take for someone who supports the use of puberty blockers.
Against Artificial Intelligence and JK Rowling
Dawson is against the use of AI in producing literature, and, in discussing an AI-generated book which had been quite successful after promotion on TikTok, made the following comment:
Both author and publisher were forced to admit, very recently, that it was at least partially AI generated. That’s right, Hachette UK released slop. And in this instance, it was AI slop, not J. K. Rowling’s latest.
Juno Dawson’s jibe at JKR as part of his ‘The Death of Reading for Pleasure’ lecture: re: children’s reading habits
Now, quite a few women did laugh at that comment but I suspect most were stoney-faced. This was a lecture celebrating children’s literature after all. Fancy dissing a fellow author? Especially one who has possibly gotten more children into reading than any other? It’s like he’d forgotten the topic of his speech – the death of reading for pleasure. Listen, I’ve never read a Harry Potter, so I don’t know what I don’t know, but I’ll take the opinions of the children I have known, like my niece and the children of my friends, who have enjoyed them, over Dawson’s bitterness any day of the week.
In the very next breath, Dawson urged publishers to engage with fandom on social media. I mean, the guy was all over the place and had been speaking way too long. Almost an hour in fact, meaning, of course, that there would be no time for Q&A. I predicted that ahead of time, these people never want to do Q&A with terfs lurking. In particular, he did not want any questions about his on-the-record support for Mermaids or his bullying of fellow children’s author Rachel Rooney. So he ran down the clock instead.
Trashing the GCSE syllabus
Dawson, going full philistine, explained that he wasn’t happy that Shakespeare and the 19th Century Novel were still part of the GCSE syllabus. He’d looked through the current specification and the most recent novel was from 2017 and felt there should be more contemporary novels. This opinion, coming so quickly after his general disdain for social media and AI, was quite the surprise and one could literally feel the winces go round the room. It also made it look as if he didn’t under the difference between academic study and leisure time.
Anyway, guess what Dawson wants put on the curriculum instead? Heartstopper. That’s right, he wants to get rid of boring old Willy Shakespeare (what did he ever do anyway?) and put Heartstopper on. Heartstopper, for those of you who don’t know, isn’t even a bloody novel. It’s a graphic novel. Written by Alice Oseman, who identifies as ‘aroace’ (aro being aromantic and ace being asexual (i.e. a fancy way of announcing you have no personality)). I’m not against graphic novels per se, but, just like films, they are not literature and therefore would have no place whatsoever on an English Literature syllabus. Dawson got away with this because the room didn’t know the book. I mean, if Heartstopper can go on, why not memes off the internet? Isn’t that the same sort of thing?
Dawson derisively told us that we didn’t need to learn about characters, plots, themes, building tension, from ‘two hundred year old texts written by a man’. Hilarious, when you consider that many of the great 19th century novels were written by women. Was he trolling? Hard to tell. Probably not, as he then put his tinfoil hat on and told us that ‘somewhere in London, in a room, choices are being made … probably by a middle aged person.’ Dawson is 44 years old.
All reading was good reading, according to Dawson now, and gave a shout-out to a site I’d never heard of before – Wattpad (which appears to be the kind of place you’d find AI generated pap). In fact, he was most specific, according to him ‘horny Wattpad k pop fan fiction’ is reading. So, as one does, I put that into Mr Google and the story below right, came up at the top of the list:
Dawson continued: ‘Song lyrics is reading. Graphic novels and comic books are – and have always been – reading,’ and that we should not be snobbish (reverse snobbery about JK Rowling, Shakespeare and 19th Century Novels excepted). Dawson impressed on us that he grew up on Turkey Twizzlers and it never did him any harm, orwite! (According to Mr Google, Bernard Matthews first released the product in 1997, when Dawson was 13 or thereabouts. Sad.)
Dawson dropped English the second he could, didn’t do it at A level, and that’s all because the equivalent of Turkey Twizzlers was not available on the academic menu, which should been tailored for him and not for kids who actually wanted to be exposed to Middle English or the novels which have shaped our history. (Okay, okay, he didn’t actually say these things, but it’s basically what he was implying.)
On the topic of audiobooks, he did have a worry though, as people could listen whilst doomscrolling (never mind that the text is interpreted by the person performing the role of reader, not the listener, and thus is not remotely like reading). Then he did the John Waters’ quote: “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em,” minus the F-word. Which had a funny effect on me: fancy Waters being sniffy about non-book owners, when his entire career he has dined off a certain giant steamy freshly laid dog-sh- … ‘Shopping should be a gorgeous experience,’ wittered a now desperate Dawson, exalting the benefits of books being sold in outlets, which also sell other things, like coffee, clothes and music. Like supermarkets have been these last 30 years? Moron.
Maybe Juno Dawson did really write the speech the day before. Using AI.
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The Lies They Tell 