The book sounds harmful, but is it the job of libraries to pick books according to such a criterion? That question was going to be rhetorical, but now I think about it, I genuinely have no idea if public libraries have some charter or other that would restrict what kind of books they hold.
I would be more concerned about books on woo-woo health stuff like homeopathy - I’m sure there are books in libraries that have the effect of discouraging people (including parents) from using alternative medicine instead of medicine.
BTW, 58 libraries is about 2% of the total libraries in the UK.
On the one hand, you don’t really want to give people the power to decide what books are available. Assholes would use that to remove queer books, for example.
On the other hand, that power is already implicitly in place. There’s finite space in a library, so they must choose a subset of all possible books. I’d want to know how the existing processes work before suggesting changes.
Here’s the problem - book bans swing both ways.
Whatever justification you use to get books like this out of the library will inevitably be contorted by conservatives to ban books on healthy transitioning.
IDK what the solve is here, would love to hear folks thoughts. Move it to the fiction section? Staple a disclaimer inside the cover?
Let people read whatever book they want and make up their own minds. Libraries aren’t supposed to be a “ministry of truth”
The right doesn’t need the left to do something to do it, they just do it. Reform in Kent already tried to do a ban against books with ‘transgender themes’ (this was later revised to adult transgender books being in the children’s section after backlash). If we’re going to not exercise power, it should be for something more than a fear the right will also do it, because the right doesn’t care and will do it anyway.
If someone is able to find out they aren’t actually trans, isn’t that a good thing? Having doubts about gender while growing up might be a new normal we’ll have to learn how to handle, there will be some people that are cis and there will be some people that actually have gender dysphoria and transitioning would be in their best interest.
Their goal has always been the total non-existence of trans people. They don’t actually care about whether it’s the right choice for someone or not, they simply do not want it to happen at all.
I do wish downvoters were public so I could block the 4 fuckers who downvoted this, yet said nothing. I guess those types only like public discourse when the platform is rigged for them, and this ain’t X.
To add to my point: they will use any and all means to achieve that goal whether it’s playing for optics by finding horror stories or convenient grifters to exploit or simply parading ugly looking trans people in the papers to trigger fear in some cis people with particularly feeble minds, or spreading this eliminationist rhetoric once they got enough credibility with the public after millions of dollars spent on non-stop daily alarmist bullshit.
