Librarians have been acting like bespectacled zealots in the culture war, suppressing books by gender critical authors like Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock and promoting books by trans right activists, a new report from the Free Speech Union has revealed. The Telegraph has more.
Public libraries have been “captured by woke activists”, campaigners have said after figures showed they have far fewer gender-critical books than trans-activist titles.
Dozens of councils across the country are stuffing their library shelves with books favourable to trans-activist opinions, with some offering no gender-critical alternative.
A survey of 49 major local authorities with online library catalogues, shared exclusively with The Telegraph, shows that two-thirds offer more trans than gender-critical books, despite the latter proving twice as popular in loans.
They have now been accused of “behaving like bespectacled zealots in the culture war” by “censoring books”.
The investigation by the Free Speech Union (FSU) – the first widespread snapshot of the trans debate in public libraries – asked councils how much stock they had of five best-selling trans-activist books, and five of the most popular gender-critical books, in September and October.
The former were books supporting the view that trans women are women and gender can be self-identified, while the latter argued that women must be born female and binary sex cannot be changed.
Some 446 copies of the trans-activist books were held by the public libraries, amounting to 9.1 per council, 62 per cent more than the 274 copies of the gender-critical books, 5.6 per council.
This is despite data from the 49 councils showing that 43 per cent of the gender-critical books were on loan, compared to just 20 per cent of the trans-activist works, suggesting that current stocks are not matching public demand.
Two-thirds of the councils had more trans-activist than gender-critical books, while 14 per cent listed the same number of each genre and just a fifth listed more gender-critical than trans-activist books.
All five of the councils with the fewest gender-critical books were Labour-run: Enfield, Bolton, Wigan, Brent and Ealing, with three of them stocking none at all. In contrast, all of the 49 local authorities had at least one trans-activist book.
Of the nine councils that provided reservation data for books already out on loan, a total of 29 bookings had been made for gender-critical books but zero trans-activist books had been reserved. …
Toby Young, general secretary of the FSU, said: “There are still a lot of sensible librarians out there who believe public libraries shouldn’t take sides on contentious political issues.
“But unfortunately too many libraries have been captured by woke activists behaving like bespectacled zealots in the culture war.”
Worth reading in full.
You can read the FSU’s report here.
Stop Press: The Welsh Government is going to include transwomen in the definition of women in the Gender Quotas Bill, which proposes that half the candidates in any list to be members of the Senedd must be women. For the purposes of the proposed legislation this includes transgender women, according to a leaked draft of the bill. The Telegraph has more.
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