Not wheeshting like a boss
It’s not easy being the National Library of Scotland.
Scotland’s national library has been accused of “cowardice” after removing a bestselling gender-critical book from a major exhibition following staff complaints.
The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, co-edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, features more than 30 essays from contributors including JK Rowling, former MP Joanna Cherry KC, MSP Ash Regan, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss.
It charts a five-year campaign opposing Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to reform Scotland’s gender recognition laws to allow so-called self-ID law.
Well not “reform” so much as “change” – because “reform” implies improve.
The collection received four public nominations for the National Library of Scotland’s Dear Library exhibition, twice the number usually needed to guarantee inclusion in the 200-title display, which opened in June to mark the library’s centenary.
Then that’s why. Two is the right number; more than two is just greedy.
[D]ocuments released under Freedom of Information reveal the library’s LGBT+ staff network raised concerns at a meeting with managers on May 7, later warning that the book carried “significant risks” to relationships with authors and stakeholders and could cause “severe harm” to staff.
They claimed it promoted “hate speech” comparable to racism.
Ah but you see it’s not comparable to racism. That’s where the ideology gets it so very very very wrong. It’s not like racism at all. Men pretending to be women is not like Medgar Evers attending the University of Mississippi (and being murdered for it). India Willoughby is not comparable to Fannie Lou Hamer. Men being told they can’t barge into women’s toilets is not like the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
On May 14, the network was told the book would be included, with “safeguarding measures” in place. An internal note described it as “a book that calls for exclusion of a section of society” and asked whether calling it “divisive” would “minimise the harm” of including it.
That’s a lie though. Knowing and saying that men are not women is not a form of cruel/unwarranted/phobic exclusion, just as it’s not “exclusionary” to say that potatoes are not lemons or bicycles are not airplanes. We’re allowed to know the differences between things, and in fact we have to know them in order to function. If we refuse to know differences we’ll be eating dog shit and throwing away ice cream. Knowing the difference between women and men is very literally how we got here. Without it? No humans at all.
In a letter to Ms Shah, Ms Dalgety and Dr Hunter-Blackburn said: “The material disclosed makes clear that you, and some of your senior colleagues, allowed activists on your staff to characterise the very existence of the book as harmful, hateful and akin to racism and homophobia. By conceding to this internal lobbying, not only have you allowed this defamatory misrepresentation to go unchallenged, but you have in effect endorsed it.”
And you are a library.
Ms Dalgety and Ms Hunter Blackburn called for Ms Shah and chair of the Library, Sir Drummond Bone, to meet them and explain “why our book was deemed too harmful to the Library to be treated like any other”. Ms Cherry said she was “appalled” the library had “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”.
Bathgate and Linlithgow MP Kirsteen Sullivan tweeted: “Absolutely ridiculous – censoring a book that gives detailed accounts of women who have been unjustly censored! I’ve had my copy since day one – if you’ve still to read it, now’s the time to buy!”
I suppose this will sell more copies. Always look on the bright side of life.
I’m flashing on an old Danziger cartoon (which I can no longer locate).
It shows Salman Rushdie running terrified from a mob bearing pitchforks and torches. Hot on his heels is his publisher, a copy of “The Satanic Verses” in his arm, joyfully shouting, “I tell you, Rushdie, you can’t buy publicity like this!”
Were library patrons going to throw the book at the staff? Bludgeon them with it?
Good grief. Any librarian that thinks the presence of a book causes them severe harm really needs to find another line of work. they clearly don’t believe in the mission of libraries. Even worse is the decision of management to bow to an activist group and surrender their commitment to what a library should be. The misrepresentation of the book is just the disgusting icing on a foul cake.
Steven,
The cartoon in question refers to the “Great Mooninite Panic of 2007” – a guerrilla campaign for a show on the cartoon Network.
It looks like the cartoon itself has been scrubbed – an out of focus preview shows a figure in a Boston jail (one of the people who was putting up ads for the campaign) facing a lawyer who says, “the client(cartoon Network) is very happy, you can’t buy publicity like this.”
I find myself wondering if the National Library of Scotland does like so many US libraries do, and put up a display of ‘banned books’ for a period of time every year… That would be an interesting exhibit, no?
@5 ha – if a library can deliberately display an entire set of ‘banned books’ and nobody dies, it makes you wonder how much ‘harm’ they actually cause….
@3 it was my misfortune a couple of months ago to sit through an hour-long presentation by an earnest young woman employed to be the DEI representative for her organisation (I’ve noted elsewhere that this seems to be a job pretty much exclusively reserved for young white generally attractive well-educated and well-off women) who, among other things, spent a lot of time stressing the idea of ‘harm’ rather than (merely) ‘offense’. ‘This isn’t about being offended, this isn’t about special snowflakes, this is about harm.’ I pressed her to actually tell us what the ‘harm’ is. She pointed out, legitimately, that studies show a hostile workplace can lead to higher cortisol levels in people who feel under threat, which can have detrimental health effects. Yes I know that, but how does this tie into anything you’re attempting to teach us? It’s like the tenuous/ridiculous connection between women pointing out that people can’t change sex and the high death rate of male Brazilian prostitutes – even if I accept that the latter happens, how is it related to the former?
Good grief guest. I hope she doesn’t do anything like driving, walking down a dark street, or eating unhealthy foods.
Correction: the reference in the cartoon was to the Comedy Channel, not the cartoon Network.