Once upon a time, I wrote about how I had habituated to the tiny decisions I made throughout the day as a gender non-conforming person to ensure my safety. I labeled what I endured as casual violence. Later on, I described how institutions like the Vancouver Public Library platforming anti-trans rhetoric contributed to making things less safe for me and I invoked the pyramid of hate to try to explain why.
With the news of the Ottawa Public Library deciding not to remove from its catalog Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, a book pressing parents to reject their gender non-conforming children, I thought I’d offer up a different way to explain how outcomes like this are harmful.
Discomfort vs. Harm
In explaining why it wouldn’t remove the title, the Ottawa Public Library stated:
The OPL says the book comes from an authoritative publisher, it was chosen as one of the top books of 2020 by The Economist and there is public demand for it.
“Six different individuals of the Ottawa public who use the library had requested that we purchase this book,” [Ann Archer, Program Manager content services with the Ottawa Public Library] said.
She adds that there are currently more than thirty users on a waitlist for the book.
“There needs to be a legal reason at this point to remove the book. We don’t remove it because people don’t like it. There’s something to offend everyone in the library.”
There’s a lot to agree on with this viewpoint. It’s important to be exposed to ideas that challenge the way we understand things; it’s how we grow. It’s likewise essential for libraries to become safe havens for books that make some readers uncomfortable. As a queer & trans person, I’m well aware that the most challenged books in libraries are those that contain positive depictions of people like me. I benefit from librarians standing up against calls to remove content.
The view expressed by the program manager at the OPL however is incomplete because it posits that books can only be offensive, not harmful. How could words printed on a page possibly be harmful? Unless the ink is poisoned or the pages covered in anthrax, that couldn’t be, right?
It’s not book that makes it harmful. It’s the combination of its contents and the context in which it’s available. These works do not exist in a void. Current culture makes the difference as to whether a book is an insight into historical bias or a contemporaneous participant in harming a minority. The Ottawa Public Library understands this distinction as it declines to carry the anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the child abuse guide To Train Up a Child. There’s an acknowledgement that enough people who read these would take their content to heart and that the responsible move is not to buy a bunch of copies to grant it even more of a platform.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters was written by an author who also pens articles like “The Transgender Threat to Women’s Sports“. The book popularizes a conspiracy theory sourced from the forums Transgendertrend and 4thwavenow. I’ve written about this book before here and here and the bogus science its based off of here.
The book has been released at a time where trans youth are the targets of a culture war that a decade previous had its sights on gay couples. In Canada, parliamentarians and newspaper columnists are arguing that trans youth should be forced to undergo conversion therapy if their parents so desire. In the United-States, gender affirming care for trans youth is being outlawed, as is their participation in sports and access to washrooms. In the United Kingdom, courts ruled to block gender affirming care for trans youth to the praise of mainstream outlets such as The Economist. The latter’s rejoice is hardly a surprise given that the magazine asked on Twitter “should transgender people be sterilized?” and that its executive editor has called trans people “frauds” and equated them with pedophiles while also penning the bestseller “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” which embraces conspiracy theories. This is the authority the Ottawa Public Library cited to justify carrying Irreversible Damage.
These young people are at the point in their lives where they have the least amount of tools and experience to cope with this rejection, the least amount of agency to remove themselves from people doing them harm, and the least amount of resources to improve their mental health. So it’s unsurprising then that 57% of trans youth in Ontario with unsupportive parents attempt suicide each year, as compared to 4% of trans youth with supportive parents.
Irreversible Damage is not just a deeply ignorant exploration of gender identity. It was from the outset intended to give those charged with protecting gender diverse children justifications to act cruelly towards them. I understand parents may have questions like “what do I do so they don’t have regrets in adulthood?” There needs to be avenues for them to find answers and for people to be imperfect. But this book does not value these youths or seek to build understanding. It is purely an exercise in prejudice. The Ottawa Public Library defends disseminating this bigotry in a province where 67% of trans youth report their parents being unsupportive.
The idea that the library here is neutral is a myth. Libraries continually make decisions about which books not to purchase, and they are quite comfortable declining content that they believe would cross a line. The problem is that cisgender librarians determine what the line is and they believe this content doesn’t cross it. To the contrary, the Ottawa Public Library bought twenty-six copies.
This makes this Ottawa institution a participant in the moment.
Back to the Iceberg
This incident with the Ottawa Public Library reminds me that there is the transphobia the prevailing culture is willing to condemn, and that which it defends.
On the condemn side, there’s murder and yelling slurs. If this was an iceberg, that would be the visible bit: the stuff mainstream culture is comfortable identifying as wrong.
The giant portion of the iceberg hidden underneath the surface is the transphobia the dominant culture defends. The view that the acceptance of trans people poses a threat is expressed in parliament, in libraries, in newspapers, on social media, on television, in advertising, on the streets, etc. To question granting this bigotry a platform is met with accusations of infringing rights which is rooted in the myth that these platforms are unmoderated.
It just takes an uncensored picture of a nipple coded to be a woman’s to prove them wrong. These platforms refuse to host content all the time when they fail to meet their standards of acceptability. What is deemed acceptable is subject to the bias of those who call the shots. If those decision makers are older white cis people, that will be reflected in what content is platformed. The end result is that any criticism for disseminating this transphobia is regarded as threatening the integrity of the institutions. This shuts down nuanced discussions around free speech and makes it very difficult to challenge this prejudice.
The effect of amplifying this transphobia by voluntarily granting it platforms is that I am constantly exposed to messaging that portrays people like me as a threat. It’s not so much about the decision of the people at the OPL; it’s rather the cumulative impact of a thousand choices like it. For as long as such messaging remains prevalent, we’ll be forcing gender non-comforming people to fill their days with tiny decisions to stay safe.