They feel powerful enough to pressure libraries to censor books they don't like. Maybe they no longer need our support.
A Whitehorse library in Canada found itself targeted by social media in April, drawing the attention of a ‘concerned’ legislator about the ‘blatantly transphobic’ ‘staff pick’ book by Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
The typical Twitstorm pile-on caught the attention of Lane Tredger, the first openly non-binary MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) in the Yukon Territory. They called it ‘a really hateful book’.
I haven’t read Irreversible Damage myself, but when the alpha-gang calls something ‘transphobic’ and ‘hateful’ it almost certainly means, ‘We have no logical, evidence-based response, and we can only allege fake damage.’ I’m not sure whether Tredger has read the book either.
The gender-critical Irreversible Damage is one of those hot-button books that drives the queer community insane. It’s not without its problems; it was published by a conservative outfit and the clickbait title doesn’t help. Shrier defends her book, claiming it’s been ‘misconstrued’. Also, some respectable sources have taken issue with the accuracy of the science presented.
There’s so much that’s reprehensible about this kerfuffle, so let’s start with Tredger’s contradictory statement about their intentions: “My personal opinion is that I don't think we should ban books but I do think for me, the line is when we start promoting them."
This is how censorship, banning and authoritarianism begin: With the contradictory conjunction ‘but’.
‘Re-education’ for libraries
The Yukon public libraries director, Melissa Yu Schott, has launched the requisite reconsideration-of-materials process to address the concerns.
"I love the library so much — I think it's such an important space that's so welcoming, so it was pretty blindsiding to see that really hateful book be promoted there," Tredger commented.
What’s ‘hateful’ for LGBTQ today is any discussion, however reasonable, questioning ideological gender claims. Thou shalt not analyze and critique their narratives. Ever.
Ledger cited how ‘pretty upset’ and ‘pretty concerned’ the usual Last Words on intellectual policy were—the customary culprits on social media.
Yu Schott notes that they, like most libraries, strive to provide a wide, divergent range of views on many topics, controversial or otherwise, and notes it doesn’t connote a library endorsement of the topic.
Tredger says they want library picks to be ‘in line’ with the library’s values.
Which they are.
So they don’t, really.
Queer Yukon has offered ‘inclusivity training’ for the library staff. The library reached out to them for help in addressing this issue, and if they’ve reached out to an alternative organization for a differing opinion, say to a gender-critical or an unbiased science group, the CBC article doesn’t mention it. It demonstrates the customary lack of questioning that has come to infect the so-called responsible news media on this side of the border, too.
The Queer Yukon executive director emphasized the importance of ‘inclusivity’ training, and the CBC never asks the larger question: How can they claim ‘inclusivity’ when they want a book excluded from ‘staff picks’? Someone clearly thought it was worth recommending. It’s not censorship, but one gets the distinct feeling Tredger and Queer Yukon would be much happier if the book wasn’t offered at all.
The optics might be bad at the moment if they outright asked them to remove the book from circulation.
That would make them look like ‘censors’. Or even worse, right-wing.
As if these people were any different from the conservative Nanny State.
‘Inclusivity training’ smacks of Maoist and Vietnamese re-education camps of yore. Communism contains several similarities to fascism.
Tredger wants to ensure ‘this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”
What ‘sort of thing’, exactly? An alternative opinion that may not be perfectly in-line with science, rather a lot like numerous queer community narratives and claims? I’d bet the Yukon library system contains far less scientific books no one ever complains about, like Erich Von Daniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods’ nonsense from the ‘70s or The Celestine Prophecy.
What Tredger disputes is the library’s right to promote books with divergent views the queer community dislikes. What they object to is an opinion not their own, because they are, at heart, like their right-wing adversaries, ideological fundamentalists with unquestioned faith in their own immutable dogma.
The most disgusting comment Tredger made was when they rehashed the nonsense about how books like this are ‘getting people killed’. This is a bald-faced alpha-gang lie. If gender-critical books resulted in murders as much as they claim there would literally (they love that word!) be no trans or non-binary people left. This is the queer community’s excuse for censoring, banning, or prohibiting free speech or free thought: This is getting people killed.
Evidence-based statistics, please?
Because the numbers I’ve found indicate that transpeople are getting murdered, but according to the Human Rights Campaign it amounts to less than fifty every year. That’s one-quarter of the number of women killed in Canada in 2022 (a new high).
And not one of the transmurders, to my knowledge, is attributed to the perpetrator reading a book, watching a documentary or listening to a gender-critical panel discussion. In fact, it’s questionable how many transpeople killers read books. If males are responsible for most violent acts globally, every single year, and certainly against transfolk, let’s remember males are historically less inclined toward book-reading than females.
No murder is ever acceptable. Everyone has the right to live violence-free. Any trans murder is one too many. But zero evidence of content-influenced transperson murder refutes the queerists’ claims that books like Shrier’s, however scientifically unbalanced or poorly argued, are getting people killed.
In fact, the most common way to get trans-murdered is the same as becoming the victim of female homicide: Via a male domestic partner. Or the unfortunately legal ‘transpanic defense’ when a date discovers he’s just had sexual contact with a transwoman.
The blatant myth that gender-critical content is ‘getting people killed’ or worse, ‘literally’ killing transpeople, is a fallacy we need to challenge publicly. Murder, gender-based or not, is always appalling and transpeoples’ lives are every bit as valuable as anyone else’s. But it never helps to inflate the numbers and use it as an excuse to shut down free speech for one’s own ugly anti-intellectual agenda.
Ledger claimed books like Shrier’s were getting people ‘banned from public spaces and denying them healthcare’. There’s a little truth to that, but hardly the whole truth. Gender-critical content may harden peoples’ hearts toward trans rights but it also delineates just how far they should go. As far as I know, no one is saying transfolk have no right to visit libraries, supermarkets, town halls, or public events. In fact, the only places where they get appreciable pushback is in public-private places like bathrooms and changing rooms. It’s true that many would deny them certain types of healthcare, but mostly ‘gender-affirming’ care, especially for kids. Talk about bad science! You won’t see Queer Yukon complaining about pro-‘gender-affirming’ staff picks.
It’s a little more concerning that the right is now using it as a slippery slope to deny affirmative treatment to adults. Legal adults have the right to make their own decisions about their bodies.
Transfolk still get rushed to the emergency room if they suffer a heart attack, and in fact, they may deny themselves proper healthcare if they’re not honest with medical professionals about their birth sex. Because female bodies differ from male bodies, even after years of gender-affirming care. The wrong treatment could kill the patient.
The brave little libraries who waved bye-bye
While Queer Yukon takes baby steps toward intellectual dictatorship with a Maoist-reminiscent re-education camp up in caribou country, Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver libraries showed more balls and labia than, so far, has the Whitehorse Public Library. A few years ago, Halifax and Ottawa waved au revoir to their respective local Pride organizations after they refused the outright book bans Pride demanded, while the Vancouver Public Libraries did so after they refused to de-platform a gender-critical feminist who gave a public talk at the library.
In 2021, parents of alleged ‘trans’ kids and activists pressured Halifax Public Libraries to remove the Shrier book, with the usual bold lies they weren’t ‘censoring’. A trans intern at one of the libraries issued the usual contradictory pr-censorship statement denying it, claiming they and other activists aren’t trying to censor books ‘broadly’, but they didn’t want it in the library’s collection.
Translation: “Look, I’m only trying to censor books narrowly. For now.”
Another activist offered the typically tortured view that asking the book to be removed from the library system doesn’t constitute censorship, that it “isn’t stopping [Shrier] from selling her book or publishing her book…”
Like maybe on Amazon, where LGBTQ censors were unsuccessful in getting it removed?
The parents and activists offered the same old tired bullshit about how it was getting people killed, and not supporting trans kids. The aforementioned trans-nutzi intern, demonstrating breathtaking ignorance and disavowal of democratic free speech, not to mention the foundational principles upon which North American libraries are built, claimed, “BUT [emphasis mine] libraries can’t take a neutral stance, because taking a neutral stance means you are siding with the oppressors. If the library is safe for transphobia, it’s not safe for trans people. Full stop. And I don’t believe it violates the mandate of free speech for libraries to pick and choose” their content.
This is EXACTLY what libraries are supposed to do, as defined by their own charters and the Canadian Federation of Library Association’s statement on intellectual freedoms.
Instead, we get the self-appointed arbiter of appropriate content, a kid in their twenties who thinks they know better than the rest of us what we should be allowed to read, and who seems to think books they disagree with are going to jump off the shelves and beat trans people senseless.
Shortly after, Halifax Pride censors severed ties with their libraries when they flat-out refused to remove Shrier’s book, which over twenty people were on the waiting list to borrow. Halifax libraries didn’t participate in the 2021 Pride festival, and their rooms no longer rented by Pride members until and unless they changed their policy on how to review and determine books for circulation.
The Ottawa public library system also bid their Pride organization So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. They refused to remove Shrier’s book from circulation upon the trans-dicktators’ demand.
A little earlier, on t’other side of the country….
The Vancouver Public Library joined several other city-wide organizations banned from the Pride Festival in 2019 when they refused calls to deplatform Canadian gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy, who made headlines the year prior by getting banned from pre-Musk Twitter for challenging transwomen.
"During this event, five speakers asserted that trans women are not women and should not be treated as women," stated Vancouver Pride, accurately. Murphy has been highly critical of both transwomen and the sex worker trade, but they’re still opinions, and hardly qualify as ‘hate speech’, which in the olden days not so long ago required actual threats or encouragement to act violently against other groups of people, rather than simply disagreeing with their self-image.
Pride met with the library but claimed their concerns about Murphy and other prominent feminist speakers were ‘not addressed’, meaning their calls for censorship were rejected.
The library noted they consulted lawyers which determined the library was not in violation of the B.C. Human Rights Code before holding the event.
Vancouver Pride had nothing to stand on, so they withdrew support of the library.
They banned the Vancouver Police in 2018 over concerns from Black Lives Matter and other groups who felt ‘unsafe’ around them, as Toronto Pride did a few years ago as well.
If Pride doesn’t stop banning groups who don’t uncritically do what they’re told, perhaps there will be no more Pride festivals, or their parades will last about five minutes.
Do Canadian Pride orgs really need our support anymore?
Trumpery seemed to have arrived in Canada early last year when the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ effectively shut down Ottawa for several weeks.
Canadians looked nervously at each other as truckers arrived to shut down debate, carting with them all the usual symbols of real hate speech:
Confederate flags, Nazi swag, and threatening toxic male swagger.
But it’s much harder to identify the enemy from within.
The LGBTQ movement has begun turning its back on the principles of democracy, on both sides of the border, and also in Europe. Transactivists, mostly biological men, routinely assault feminists like Kelly-Jay Keen who speak out against what they see as an attack on women’s rights by the oppressor class dressing as women.
Barring or severing ties with libraries, when they’re doing their damn jobs providing alternative opinions, helping visitors determine what to think about, rather than what to think as the Pride organizations prefer, is the very definition of authoritarianism and aspiring dictatorship. I won’t call it ‘fascism’, yet. I’m striving to be more concise in my speech, to not use and abuse emotionally-laden verbiage as we all are inclined to do, but Pride groups’ actions toward Canada’s bastions of free thought bear some resemblance to what we’ve seen from Nazi Germany and other fascist dictatorships. Including Communism.
Like that if you repeat a lie often enough eventually it will be believed, as has happened with the statistically bankrupt claims that consuming certain ‘dangerous’ content inclines people to violence. That’s not a completely false claim - history documents the Bible and the Koran guilty as charged - but it doesn’t apply to probably 99% of everything that’s ever been published, that wasn’t specifically designed to incite hatred and violence.
Exceptions: Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Anarchist Cookbook.
The anti-democratic attack on libraries by the woke in North America demonstrates the alpha-gang are today somewhat less marginalized than advertised, when they boldly attack free thought and appoint themselves our intellectual masters. They want one viewpoint promoted and circulated, and one viewpoint only: An uncritical submissive acceptance of gender ideology, unchallenged by any critical analysis and untainted by rational thought. These same people would lose their rainbow minds if library systems bowed to the other side’s demands to promote only conservative, Christian-centered views on gender ideology.
Pride groups have every right to prohibit others from marching in their parades. Perhaps pro-democracy groups who still respect democratic Canadian values can proactively withdraw support in service to rational thought.
It's clear that Pride isn’t much marginalized anymore, and no longer needs us.
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