Publishing v reality
Sex Matters has a new report on Everyday cancellation in publishing.
This research investigates the working environment for authors, agents and publishing staff who believe that sex is binary and immutable, and that it matters in life and law. It was commissioned to investigate widespread but anecdotal reports that publishing has become a hostile environment for people who hold gender-critical beliefs.
That’s an important thing to investigate. Publishing, like universities, journalism, social media, conversation, is how we learn about things: how we learn truths and also falsehoods. We all rely on these institutions and pastimes to get things right, so that we can get them right ourselves, and not fuck everything up by getting them badly horrifyingly wrong. You see what I mean? We want publishing to aim for accuracy and truth, as opposed to systematically and coercively lying to us.
Abuse of those with gender-critical views in publishing has been relentless. People – usually women – have received death and rape threats. Others in the industry have threatened them with reputational damage and loss of work, have used slurs and insults against them, and conflated their views with transphobia, homophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry. Gender-critical individuals working in publishing have been accused of wanting the deaths of trans-identifying teenagers and working towards genocide. There have been industry calls for those with gender-critical beliefs to be demonised, and they have been labelled as fascists for thinking that there are two sexes.
In 2020, the former children’s author Gillian Philip added the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter (now X) profile. She was then subjected to an extreme 24-hour social-media pile-on that included death threats. Philip’s contract was immediately terminated by her publisher with the tacit support of her agent.
Is that Stalinist enough yet?
Journalists on BBC Radio 4’s flagship women’s-affairs programme Woman’s Hour have not interviewed best-selling gender-critical authors about their books, despite the issues they cover being so relevant to women. By contrast male gender-studies academic Grace Lavery has been interviewed, despite selling only 1,723 copies of Please Miss – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. So has Juno Dawson, a male transactivist who also identifies as a woman. Dawson has depicted womanhood as a submissive sexual identity: “I knew I wanted to be ‘the woman’ when it came to sex… It was a conscious urge to get fucked, be penetrated as a woman would be.” It is surprising that somebody with such a perspective, which arguably undermines the position of women in society, has been platformed on a programme about women instead of authors who argue for women’s rights.
Especially when that programme is not on a commercial channel but rather the BBC.
To be continued
Libraries, too. My city’s library system is captured. I watch the weekly new acquisitions list for non-fiction stuff, and while I’ve seen lots of rah-rah trans stuff (including both Lavery and Dawson), I’ve never seen any of the feminist critiques of genderism show up. No Schreiber, no Stock, no Joyce, no Lawford-Smith. For Pride month, the Trans flag (along with the original, old fashion, rarely-ever-seen-at-all-anymore LGB Pride flag) is hanging in the lobby of the main branch, and a display inviting you to “guess the gender,” using a selection of the various licorice allsorts “gender identity” flags that have been concocted is posted elsewhere. I’d sooner watch paint dry, thanks. One of the staff in our local branch is a guy in a dress. Polite enough, but still off-putting; I’m always wondering if he’s forcing his way into women’s spaces. The tide can’t turn soon enough.
Are they in the catalogue?
This may be off-topic but Booksmith in SF has sanctimoniously taken JKR’s books off their shelves.
https://abc7news.com/amp/post/san-francisco-bookstore-booksmith-no-longer-selling-harry-potter-series-due-jk-rowlings-anti-transgender-politics/16848268/
Comically, their home page touts “Books Not Bans” “a fundraiser to help ship crates of queer, affirmative, necessary books to book deserts and communities with bans in place”
To satisfy myself, I needed ONE example, so I confirmed that admitted serial rapist Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is available. I’m not suggesting it shouldn’t be but that the hypocrisy is staggering.
not Bruce, I was checked out in Barnes and Noble the other day by a dude with a pony tail, and clearly identifying as a woman. I don’t remember the name on his name tag, but it was a woman’s name, and one of the types favored by TiMs. He was polite, but was nowhere near as friendly or polite as the clerks I am used to in there.
No, they are not in the catalogue. I’d bet they weren’t even ever ordered. Given the heavy input of trans-friendly/centering/glorifying stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a deliberate choice to not bring such titles or authors in. During Pride Month (and the multitude of other Trans Observances), I’ve certainly seen a good number of items on display aimed at children. Get them while they’re young, right? Never too soon to start feeding them delusional, bullshit biology and metaphysics.
These absent works might be available through Interlibrary Loans (which can get items from libraries all over the province, sometimes even farther afield) but the system is being upgraded, and its public, self-service portal is not running, so I can’t check to see if this “shadow banning” is more widespread than the London Public Library. If and when Canada catches up with the UK in regards to resistance and rollback, we might see more content generated on this side of the ocean.
Just checking the Collection Development Policy, I could see where gender zealots could cause mischief. Here’s a pretext they might use:
Sure the policy also says
But captured purchasing staff can probably decide to not buy stuff that they, like the publishers cited above in the OP, have deemed unacceptable. Given the near-infinite elasticity of the concept of “transphobia”, such cryptic boycotters and censors can justify their decisions with a straight face. They get to be gatekeepers, and we’ve certainly seen where unaccountable, malicious activism in key positions can skew the workings of entire departments, organizations, governments etc.
Maybe I’m paranoid, but that’s what I think is behind this lack of gender critical voices in our public library collection. Taking just a quick look through the catologue under “gender”, there are scores of books soaked in this topic, many for children, all published since 2024, almost all of which are pro-trans*. Of course, with publishers weeding out the works of hateful, transphobic, genocidal bigots to start with, what’s actually published is going to be skewed from the outset. Combine that with what I think is a determined effort to find as much trans propaganda as possible, and you’ve got a library that’s taken a side, without saying they’ve done so. I don’t think it’s accidental, or the workings of chance, unless accidents and chance favour just one side of this controversy over the other, like a magical, un-rigged coin that, in defiance of probability, always comes up heads.
*I only came across one which looked like it was going to take the material reality of sex seriously, a book by Duke University law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman**,On sex and gender a commonsense approach.
**On looking Coleman up, I came across the following interesting resource: Transgender Map (https://www.transgendermap.com/) , which characterizes what they call her “Anti-transgender activism”
Coleman and Martina Navratilova co-founded the anti-trans organization Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.
Coleman has testified against trans athletes in sex-segregated competitive sports:
I looked for Doc Stock and Helen Joyce in the Seattle PL catalogue and they’re there, so that’s a relief.
There should be some kind of systematic review of this – which libraries do and which don’t. The terfs could all team up and check some libraries and pool the results.
I just checked the Lincoln Public Library system; neither Helen Joyce nor Kathleen Stock appear to be there. I am going to request they order them.
Yes!