Yet again the people who should know better collapse like melting butter because the teenagers might pitch a fit.

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Yay centenary no not you.

Members of the public had been asked by the library, which promotes itself as a national forum for “ideas, debate and discussion”, to nominate books which had shaped their lives for inclusion in a ten-month public display intended as a “love letter” to the power of reading.

However, despite The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht receiving double the number of nominations necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Dear Library public display, Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and the NLS chief executive, decided not to include the book after a staff backlash.

Because women must not be allowed to say men are not women, and if they do somehow get away with saying it somewhere, the saying must be hastily and thoroughly disavowed and concealed. This is a tribute to the power of reading.

Documents seen by The Times show a major row broke out at the national library in which some workers repeatedly lobbied for the removal of the critically acclaimed collection of essays, edited by the policy analyst Lucy Hunter Blackburn and the newspaper columnist Susan Dalgety and including a contribution by JK Rowling.

Repeatedly lobbied for the removal why? Because people must not be free to say that men are not women.

Shah ultimately decided not to include the book due to concerns about “the potential impact on key stakeholders” who she feared could “withdraw support for the exhibition and the centenary”.

Dalgety and Hunter Blackburn said it had been “devastating” to learn that their book had been “censored in this cowardly and anti-democratic way by our national library”.

In a letter to Shah, they have called for the decision to be reversed, and for a meeting so that she can explain to them in person why they [she] had allowed their work to be treated as a “dangerous object” rather than an account of a significant period in Scottish political history.

“But this is about more than the book,” they added. “This is the legacy of a decade of political leadership which has demonised and delegitimised people who refused to conform to the approved narrative on sex and gender identity.

“The material released also lifts the lid on the network of discrimination and censorship which operates across Scotland’s public institutions with impunity through staff networks and other activist groups, enabled by weak leadership.”

So much for “Scotland the Brave” eh what?

The public exhibition, which began in June and runs until April next year at the library’s headquarters on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, includes anti-censorship and pro-democracy imagery, something Hunter Blackburn and Dalgety said “adds to the insult”.

The pair, whose work became a Sunday Times bestseller, were also refused a platform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.

Jenny Niven, the festival’s director, said the subject of gender was “extremely divisive” and claimed events about it could be seen as “spectacle or sport” in which people’s identity was seen as “subject of debate”.

But if “people’s identity” is wholly fictitious yet treated as sacred and binding, then it should be a subject of debate. “Identity” is like The Prophet in being anxiously and/or violently sealed off from question and dissent. The more idenniny is treated as sacred and undiscussable, the more it needs discussing.

Cherry said: “I am appalled that the National Library of Scotland has bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history.”

Yeah well, women just don’t matter. We’re too boring to matter. A man who calls himself a woman is both saintly and fascinating, but a plain old common or garden woman is the most boring object on the planet.