GC Librarian

[RatinaMaze]

I lurk here a lot but post very infrequently. I'm not sure if a post like this is allowed but a encounter on Saturday has been playing on my mind. I hope the person concerned is a poster, or even a lurker, on these boards.

Visited my local library on Saturday morning. It was very quiet - I was the only customer and there were two female staff members. One of them started talking to the other about GC views, about the threat to hard won sex-based rights and the danger of being called transphobic for defending these rights. The other woman wasn't openly hostile but also didn't really seem to be getting it and was reverting to the "be kind" narrative. It is genuinely the first time I've heard GC views discussed openly in real life (beyond MN and twitter) and I thought this woman was awesome for going there. I wish I'd had the courage to speak up and say I agreed with her but I felt too awkward to do so.

Because I'd only heard their voices, I couldn't tell if the person who came out to check out my books was the one with the GC views or not. I wanted to give some kind of solidarity signal. Anyway, that's why I'm posting here. I'd like her to know she was heard and appreciated.

I know there are GC MNrs in my area - I've posted here once before about ribbons and stickers appearing and got a lovely DM from one of you who regnised my very vague location descripton. Hoping fab librarian is here. I guess, if it were me, I'd like to know that someone feels appreciative of me.

This is a lovely message.

I’m not a librarian but I have struck up a conversation in my local library in the past. The woman was very receptive and very interested.

We climb one mini-peak at a time.

Hooray for the GC librarian! One book at a time...

Fantastic. I wish this was my local library.

The battle inside the library profession is real. While there are excellent GCs around there are also people on the opposite side who would like to ban free thought. They would prefer if we were back to being Victorian librarians handing out improving tracts and preventing women from reading corrupting novels. Thread with some details:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4585299-any-cilip-members

However the library profession in the US is in a way worse state.

Hi, I'm GC and in the library world. And I stay very very quiet about it (pardon the pun). The library world in the UK is pretty much captured, and frankly, I don't want to lose my job. Which tells you all you need to know really. Some colleagues I think are GC (or reality based feminists as I prefer to "identify") and sometimes we speak in code. But other colleagues are extremely strident TRA supporters and I genuinely sometimes think it's a bit Stasi - where we'll be outed for wrongthink. So I express my views through the medium of jewellery, as I don't think I'll be sent to the gulag for wearing peridot and amethyst earrings.

Oh that’s good, I’ve had dealings with a few librarians/ people closely related to libraries through work recently and have noticed they’re the only ones stating their pronouns in their email signatures (despite it being pretty obvious what their pronouns should be).

I also worked in the library world and found it captured. A real low point was a librarian sending out an all-staff email admonishing an unidentified library assistant for putting Helen Joyce's 'Trans' book out on an LGBTQ+ display. They stated (wrongly) that it's an 'anti-trans' book and could do untold harm to a gender-confused young person that read it. I'm sure the librarian that sent that email had never read 'Trans.'
I needed the job, so didn't feel safe to say anything at the time but made damn sure there was always plenty of JK Rowling on display!

The woman checking out your books was probably a library clerk, not a librarian.

I work in libraries (front desk) & it’s very twaw. They’ve hosted drag time story hour (before I worked there) & have masses of pro trans ideology books, but very few gender critical ones. We have a workplace policy banning transphobia (I’m not in the UK, no work protection for gc views) so I’m afraid to say anything. Pronouns abound and we had a young librarian come and talk to us about (ironically) freedom of expression and how “transphobes” protested drag time story hour. It was clear no other point of view would be tolerated.

It is genuinely the first time I've heard GC views discussed openly in real life

I've never heard anyone express anything but reality based gender stuff. Not even my teenage children or friends young adult children think the whole gender-woo thing has legs. I'm yet to meet anyone who does. My young adult son and his friends think a man putting on a dress and claiming to be a woman is the funniest thing he has ever heard of (and it tbh is is quite amusing if it weren't for the same-sex spaces issue.)

DH made a few sympathetic noises because years ago he worked with a trans woman who he liked and who was very good at what they did which is fair enough. HOWEVER, while he supported her right to live as a woman (post all the surgery/hormones hence I'm referring to her as her), DH was without a doubt sure she wasn't a woman in the proper sense of the word.

On MN there always seem to be people who have friends/colleagues who all are into TWAW TMAM etc but where are these people?? I'm not saying they don't exist but I think they must be a very noisy minority.

I think you're more likely to find trans people in certain industries. I work in the public sector, know a few personally and see a larger group being active at work. Have friends in the charity sector where it is very common too.

Plenty at high school and uni too so I'm surprised your teen and early 20s don't know anyone.

The trans people I know are not TWAW, they are respectful of women's rights and just want equal rights of their own. They aren't outspoken about their views though.

I do think most trans supporters haven't really thought it through, at a high level there seems very little harm in a man who genuinely believes he's a woman and looks /behaves like a woman accessing women's areas, how would anyone even know? It's only when you look into it that a very small minority have a different agenda, but women should not be sacrificed to keep the peace.

Thank you for the really interesting thread, even if my Library staff member (apologies for the potential mix up of job titles) hasn't shown up here.

I try not to give away too much info about myself, as I said, I post only sporadically but am very GC and have been reading these boards for a long time. I work in academia so completely understand what it is like to have a sector/organisation completely taken over by the ideology. Not surprised to hear the same goes for libraries and even more impressed by the wonderful woman I overheard on Saturday.

Not meaning to hijack the thread, but what 'equal rights of their own' do the trans people you know want? 100% genuine question. Maybe if we understood what these were it would help all parties.

From my observations, and I must stress that these are observations which, in itself is an issue as I’ve never seen any TRA actually answer this question.
We get told to listen and learn but then also told that there is no debate which is a contradictory position.

Anyway… from my observations, there is conflation of “rights” and the practicalities of rights being upheld.

Trans people should not, for example, be discriminated against in the workplace, yet there are countless testimonials of bullying, harassment or not being selected for jobs for which an individual may be highly qualified.

I can’t imagine may people would disagree that this is wrong and there are rights which should, in theory, protect against these things happening.

The thing is, women also have these rights, and we also have the practical, lived experience of the rights not being upheld in practice – being patronised or harassed as a woman in the workplace, or turned down for a job because we are of child bearing age.

Yes it’s possible to challenge these things legally but in reality not many women do – it’s stressful, costly and time consuming. I guess trans people feel the same way about challenging discrimination.

What this comes down to, for me, is the male view of the world. The experience of not having to fight to be noticed, not having being bullied or have to work twice as hard to prove you can do the same job as your male counterpart.

I suspect this is where the issue of rights gets confused. Their “rights” suddenly not being visibly accessible suggests that these rights don’t actually exist. They’ll say they need more rights or they don’t have the same rights as other people when in actual fact the argument needs to be that their existing rights should be recognised.

Disclaimer here about rights which come into direct legal conflict with existing sex-based rights. I don’t think I can say anything which hasn’t already been posted many times before and in more articulate ways that I could muster. Again, no debate is the problem. Human rights exist, sex-based rights exist and there should be proper debate about the overlap areas rather than silencing and cancelling the people who seek to question the issue and then expecting women to budge up and give away our rights.

Oh I wish there were more GC library staff. My friend was a librarian but is unfortunately very captured and describes herself as 'queer' and loves any 'queer coded' media. She is Bi and married to a man so straight passing...

It is looking grim. Yet we would never think of banning religious or political ideas. The library will carry books promoting Catholicism famously anti-Trans yet it is the books written by secular feminists the captured staff plot against.

There was talk of a Gender Crit group in Cilip earlier hope it will happen. @RhubarbCrumbled

I work in libraries, not in the UK, and they really are truly captured. Not that noone is GC, but it's not easy to be open about it.

However - this is part of a larger picture. The library world, although it really ought to be very politically and ideologically neutral, is pretty deeply progressive/liberal. It can be quite difficult for people who are politically or socially or religiously conservative. There was some real controversy a few years ago about the American library association openly hosting political speakers at their conferences.

In my view it very much affects things the library does, including displays, the books they order, programming, and so on. There was a display at my library related to anti-racism about a year ago, for example - totally dominated by CT type thinking and right-on writers. Clearly missing - the Thomas Sowell book, one of the most well known black economists, who also writes on race issues. But - a conservative.

So I would really urge people, don't just look at this issue in your library, think about whether it is being biased as an organisation overall.

I wonder if this is more evidence of the struggle in the library profession. Tweet here about Suffolk Libraries providing support to menopausal people - the linked webpage talks clearly about women.
Are the (probably younger) staff in charge of social media more likely to be captured?

The library world, although it really ought to be very politically and ideologically neutral, is pretty deeply progressive/liberal. It can be quite difficult for people who are politically or socially or religiously conservative.

This does seem to cover academia, the arts, and most of the media, too.

Sadly, it's not just the younger staff. It appears to be pretty much most staff. I sometimes feel like I'm in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and someone's going to point and shriek at me, and then I'll be assimilated to the Borg (apologies for mixed sci-fi metaphors).

I sometimes think older staff can almost be worse. Some seem desperate to be right-on about everything.

In a way it reminds me of the Church of England, or some museums, they feel they need to make themselves relevant.

I also think it's partly because it's a very female dominated sector, there is a very service-oriented attitude and a certain kind of social pressure you find more in female dominated workplaces.

But it does describe that dystopian feeling so well @soddingspiderseason !

In terms of rights that trans people should have - I'd say it is more about enforcement of the rights they do have. So for example, i remember reading a couple of years ago about a transwoman golf pro giving a demonstration at a big golf tournament. Apparently there was shouting and verbal abuse from the crowd. Frankly at that point the organisers should have thrown out the abusers and stated that unless their pro was able to continue unmolested, they would close the event.

I'm an extremist on women's sport, which I believe is for women - apparently this is an extreme view. But a person in golfing kit giving a solo demonstration of a sporting skill deserves respect. Likewise, a Story Hour with a trans person reading would be great. I would definitely not want a Trans Person Story Hour as this would be transphobic, emphasising the transition as if it were the only relevant thing about them.

In the meantime, in my experience the combination of information tech and publishing are the two central axes of trans activism. Where do those two axes cross? In your library.