There's something queer in the library

The library service has been captured. It's no longer a service, and cannot be trusted to supply the books people want or need to read.

Helen Joyce finessed my understanding of the current zeitgeist (and not for the first time) when she spoke to Peter Boghossian last month. What she said was at once surprising and obvious: that the whole of gender identity ideology is “a culture bound syndrome”.

“If Buck Angel had lived in a different society, in what sense could Buck Angel have ever got the idea into Buck Angel’s head that they were meant to be a man or were really a man”.

Even if Helen is not correct – even if there are some truly gender dysphoric individuals – there is undeniably a sizeable cohort of teenage girls for whom this is true. Girls who, in any other time or place, would never – could never – have had the idea that they could be the sex they are not.

It’s useful to hold this is mind when reading the recent article in The Guardian by Alex DiFrancesco I’m a trans person who edits children’s books.

DiFrancesco (they/them) claims to be a victim of the culture war

The central thrust of the article is that:

Editors like me are accused of ‘brainwashing’ children. But I simply strive to bring books into the world that let trans children know they aren’t alone.

The books in question are “LGBTQIA+ inclusive” (i.e. TQ focussed) and DiFrancesco says:

both children and the adults reading to them – books that spread knowledge and understanding, a vital thing for trans kids, the adults who raise them, and kids who want to grow up to be accepting adults.

The claim, in a nutshell, is that people of all ages are intrinsically “transgender” (including children young enough to need an adult to read to them), and to live full and happy lives they need to read these books to understand what this means. And so does everyone else.

That people can change their gender (because it is simply not possible to change sex) is a very recent idea, and only became mainstream in the last decade. But if Helen Joyce is even partly correct, these books that claim to be describing gender identity ideology are planting that idea in the minds of susceptible children.

It's not that children are being brainwashed into believing they are transgender. It’s that it would never have occurred to them at all if they had not been exposed to this idea. But once exposed to it, the idea is very appealing for some.

So the news that libraries are actively promoting books supportive of gender ideology and suppressing books that are critical tells us they’re doing more than creating an uneven playing field in the battle of ideas.

They’re actively creating the situation they claim to be responding to.

Particularly when one of the players is Book 28, an Islington “LGBTIQ+ library” whose:

advice is also shared on the websites of professional bodies the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, and charity Libraries Connected, an organisation whose membership includes every library service in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In targeting children, they tell us that they know what they are doing.

[Book 28 guidance] suggests that “at least a quarter” of stock for young adults could relate to LGBT issues, and contrary to the caution urged for gender-critical books, suggests that for LGBT volumes, libraries would benefit from “two copies of as many titles as possible”.   

But are libraries following this guidance? Are they really queering the catalogue?

Perhaps they’re just providing the books that the public want to read.

LibrariesWest “serves a resident population of more than 2.1 million people”, but a search of their catalogue suggests that “serves” holds a different meaning for them than the rest of us. Despite gender critical books being best sellers according to Amazon rankings*, there are relatively few copies available from libraries.

Books promoting gender identity ideology, on the other hand, are significantly better stocked despite their Amazon rankings being considerably lower.

The sheer volume of titles for children (including Teens and Young Adults) and the nature of the material should give parents pause for thought. There are 28 titles available from author Juno Dawson alone, with multiple copies of each available on shelves. WRN wrote about this last year, and the situation has only got worse.

It’s enraging.

The library service is failing us. It’s misleading us and indoctrinating our children. And we’re paying for it.

*Rankings as at time of writing 2 Aug 2023