A plague on both your houses. Shakespeare’s famous line about two equally intransigent sides in a dispute could have been written about the imbroglio surrounding Cumberland Council’s recent decision to ban, through its library department, books intended for children about same-sex relationships and practices. Requiring that a title such as This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson, which features an explanation of ‘scat’ (being sexually aroused by faeces), to be physically moved from the Junior Non-Fiction or Young Adult sections to the Adult Non-Fiction section makes perfect sense. Censoring same-sex books intended for adults, though, is discrimination. Gay people are everyday people with a different sexuality. Let them be. And, unlike, transgender ideologues, gay rights campaigners do not ask society to reject biology while advocating the surgical mutilation of kids.
Need it be said that we live in a liberal democracy, where free speech is the foundation of every good we enjoy. What fevered idiocy entered the heads of the two councillors, and their supporters, who thought that banning books was a good idea? And why did the other councillors support the motion? Did the council not understand that the ban would be – as fast as one can enunciate the word ‘censorship’ – overturned? And did the two councillors not understand that they were giving their purported enemies an open door of such magnitude that a proper scrutiny of transgender ideology in institutions, especially in libraries, can now be defined as bigotry? Tactics and and strategy were obviously entirely absent from their deliberations. With friends like these, as the saying goes.
LGBTQ+ activists, though, in this dispute were not stupid. They espied an opportunity to further entrench their ideology, and they used the primary weapons of transgender ideology: the abuse of language (euphemism and equivocation, in particular) and emotionalism to muddy the waters about what constitutes and defines genuine censorship. There must have been much whooping and hollering among transgender activists at the own goal gifted to them by Cumberland Council.
In reply to the book ban, a number of speakers at a council meeting, including Councillor Linda Scott, who also happens to be the president of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), invoked the expertise and professionalism of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), which issued a statement denouncing the book ban, as a non-partisan arbiter in the culture wars. Citing ALIA as a neutral observer about politics or LGBTQ+ rights, especially transgenderism, is tantamount to asking the Politburo to speak, without fear or favour, about Marxism-Leninism. It’s an utterly captured organisation that is run by people who think the Teals care about the price of electricity, the ABC is apolitical, and the male vagin* actually exists. There are more rainbow and trans flags, per capita, in libraries than at the Sydney Gay Pride Mardi Gras.
On any contentious issue, you can guess, without asking, where ALIA stands – just think of the latest left-wing cause de jour, and bingo, there’s your answer. But on the serious issue of censorship, libraries are not the bastions of free speech that ALIA, with a heavy heart and a plaintive look, would like to portray. I should know, I’ve worked in libraries for over twenty years, and I’ve witnessed, with my own eyes, censorship being practised by library staff – censorship which was condoned, or, at the very least, covered up by library management (the majority of whom are members of ALIA), because they empathised with the jejune enthusiasm and ethical reasoning of the staff involved in banning books critical of woke politics and especially of transgender ideology.
That’s the only rational explanation for the librarians’ response to staff cancelling reservations, deliberately mis-shelving books, hiding books, physically removing books from the library, and ultimately, deleting books from the library catalogue. (I suspect that titles which don’t meet the dictates of Woke ideology are being shadow banned by IT staff in libraries all over Australia). The censored books were Trans: When Ideology meets Reality by Helen Joyce and Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters by Abigail Shrier. No stern emails explaining that free speech is the foundational principle of the public library service were sent to staff. The miscreants were not hauled before the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commissars of the Human Resources Department. The mal-educated, censorious authoritarians were not sanctioned in any way. Each of them, mirabile dictu, are studying to become library technicians and librarians. Their upwardly mobile professional careers continues apace, in other words.
As to the Cumberland Council meeting about the book ban, which can be accessed on the council’s website, it’s a farrago of transgender logical fallacies, circular reasoning, the abuse of language, hyperbolic emotions and name calling. One speaker complains about being misgendered, as if identity politics wasn’t central to the controversy, then invokes freedom, while being oblivious to people’s right to follow their conscience, including the freedom to not believe in transgender ideology.
Another speaker claims that early childhood educators, through their training, which has been captured, like much of psychology, by social justice ideology, (and hence is as unreliable a source as it is possible to cite), know how to educate children. You’d get vertigo while attempting to eat your own head trying to rationalise that logic.
As to the neutrality of ALIA’s statement and it’s commitment to free speech, either the leadership of ALIA is ignorant about politics or they’re playing the public. In their statement, ALIA claims to ‘stand with Equality Australia’, which is another circular argument, because Equality Australia is a political lobby group that advocates for transgender ideology, which is the philosophy at the core of the current controversies. ‘Properly counting’, (as Equality Australia states as one of its goals), LGBTQ+ people in the census, means the institutional embedding of gender ideology in Australia, including the use of pronouns, which, as the UK’s Cass Review states, leads vulnerable children on a pathway to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and life-altering surgery. Once again, we have a circular argument. (We’ll reference you, you’ll reference us, and we’ll both reference them).
Incidentally, the UK government has recently banned civil servants from wearing rainbow lanyards; and is removing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion philosophy from public sector bodies because the UK government claims, correctly, that DEI is politics being introduced ‘by the back door’.
Nobody, apart from an infinitesimally small number of cranks, wants to ban books. All critics of transgender ideology desire is that books are classified as age appropriate. Pretending otherwise is a lie.
