Canadian professor testifies that a last name on a vanity license plate is “gender violence”

A civil lawsuit currently before the courts is trying to determine whether or not a person’s last name is “an act of speech” that perpetuates rape culture.

Lorne Grabher had the personalized licence plate he bought for his father revoked by the Registrar of Motor Vehicles after someone phoned to complain that the plate “GRABHER” incited hatred towards women. Presumably the complainant did not realize at the time that the owner’s vanity plate was actually their Austrian-German surname.

The province of Nova Scotia refused to reinstate the plate and Lorne Grabher decided to defend his name through the civil courts.

In 1995, a Canadian gas station attendant actually named Dick Assman was briefly made famous by The Late Show with David Letterman. In the same year the sitcom Seinfeld aired an episode featuring the character of Kramer trying to track down the owner of a vanity plate “ASSMAN” which he mistakenly received from the Department of Motor Vehicles in the show.

What society used to properly treat as humour has now become part of the current outrage culture.

For the Grabher family, the dispute is not about whether or not their name is funny; they are defending their heritage. That an academic has denounced their surname as an offensive act of speech must be mortifying.

Dr. Carrie Rentschler, a professor of Feminist Media Studies at McGill University testified in court that Grabher’s last name on a licence plate was an act of "gendered violence." This says more about feminist scholarship than it says about the Grabher family. The fact that the provincial government paid for her report and testimony as an “expert” is the most offensive act in this trial.

Lorne Grabher brought in expert and sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh to rebut Rentschler’s report.

Dr. Soh points out in her own report that “‘Dr. Rentschler defines the presentation of Mr. Grabher’s last name as a “speech act” wherein its existence comprises of both its appearance and how it is “received and interpreted” by its audience as an action, or speech action.’”

That Rentschler wishes to transform the Grabher surname into an act of speech that can cause offence comes dangerously close to cultural appropriation. Is this not taking someone’s family name, and the heritage that accompanies it, and turning it into a political tool to advance her own cultural agenda?

If the Grabhers have their family named deemed offensive by a Canadian court of law how many other surnames will be up for debate? Perhaps, to understand the complexities, we need someone named Justice Dick to rule on this case.

In her report, Rentschler states that to write the report she has “consulted the relevant literatures on violence against women and the continuum of sexual violence in order to explain the contributive role offensive and rape supportive expression plays in promoting violence against women.”

In the same paragraph, Rentschler references “critical scholarship on Donald Trump’s use of the phrase ‘grab them by the pussy’ as reported during the 2016 US presidential election.” It should be noted that there is no “scholarship” on the phrase “Grabher” because Grabher is a name and not a set of words.

Mistakes happen in life.

The person who saw the vanity plate likely did not realize that the eye of the beholder is not always accurate. If a radom observer subconsciously separated the name into two words is not the fault of the licence plate holder. The fact that an academic can’t see the difference between a family name and an expression is the fault of the academic.

It would be interesting to find out how much the people of Nova Scotia paid Rentschler for her expert report and whether or not one of the results of this lawsuit will reshape who qualifies as an expert. Most certainly Rentschler is not an expert on the Austrian-German heritage of the Grabher family name.

That this dispute required two competing experts to assess whether or not the plaintiff’s name contributed to the concept of “rape culture” is mystifying. As Dr. Soh pointed out in her report, “information is dependent on its context for meaning, but this does not override objective reality.”

The objective reality in this lawsuit is that Mr. Grabher has now been forced to go to court in order to prove that his name is really just a name, despite how dirty minded his observers are.

That an academic from McGill University, the province of Nova Scotia, and the original complainant have such filthy minds that they have turned a proud family name into a sexualized phrase doesn’t make Mr. Grabher guilty of obscenity. But the entire spectacle is obscene indeed.

Hopefully the judge in this case won’t be guilty of such absurd personal projection.