Have Efforts to Suppress Gender-Critical Books and Speakers Done "Irreversible Damage" to Librarianship?

Why the release of four major reports on the negative impacts of gender identity ideology should compel a re-examination of our profession's seemingly selective commitment to intellectual freedom.

Introduction: Institutions Weigh in on the Gender Debate

In February 2023, the Canadian non-partisan MacDonald-Laurier Institute released a major report entitled, Rights and Wrongs: How Gender Self-identification Policy Places Women at Risk in Prison, detailing the “mounting number of specific instances where women have been directly harmed as a result of [gender self-ID] policies” that result in men being housed in women’s prisons. The report by UK-based criminology professor Jo Phoenix states, “[e]vidence is emerging that in Canada, the…policy change actively places women at risk, actively undermines their rights, and actively disadvantages minority women disproportionately” (p. 10).

A year later, on March 4^th, 2024, the heterodox U.S.-based think tank Environmental Progress released the “WPATH Files”, a collection of documents and media files concerning the actions, rhetoric, and internal communications of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).  Written by Canadian researcher Mia Hughes, the report (subtitled, “Pseudoscientific Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children, Adolescents and Vulnerable Adults”) revealed the extent to which

the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science…This report…show[s] that this is a violation of medical ethics and, as is revealed by its own internal communications, WPATH does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine.

Then in April, the UK saw the release of the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (otherwise known as “The Cass Review”) which had been commissioned in 2020 by England’s National Health Service and the non-governmental body NHS Improvement. The Review, based on 8 systematic reviews, concluded that

This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress (p. 13, emphasis added).

Troublingly, the author Dr. Hilary Cass, also noted that

from the start, the Review stepped into an arena where there were strong and widely divergent opinions unsupported by adequate evidence. The surrounding noise and increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate has made the work of the Review significantly harder and does nothing to serve the children and young people who may already be subject to significant minority stress (20).

Most recently, on August 27th, 2024, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, submitted to the U.N. General Assembly a report on violence against women and girls in sports. The Report begins with the assertion that “[w]omen and girls in sport face widespread, overlapping and grave forms and manifestations of violence at all levels,” noting on page 4 that

Female athletes are…more vulnerable to sustaining serious physical injuries when female-only sports spaces are opened to males, as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball, basketball and soccer. Instances have been reported where adult males have been included in teams of underage girls. Injuries have included knocked-out teeth, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures.¹

Accordingly, included among its recommendations is the direction that sporting authorities should “[e]nsure that female categories in organized sport are exclusively accessible to persons whose biological sex is female.” An additional justification for preserving the female category is the maintenance of female-only spaces, noting that:

[r]emoving single-sex spaces in sports may also increase the risk of sexual harassment, assault, voyeurism and physical and sexual attacks in unisex locker rooms and toilets. The insistence on maintaining female-only spaces, along with safeguarding and risk management protocols, arises from empirical evidence demonstrating that sex offenders tend to be male and that persistent sex offenders go to great lengths to gain access to those they wish to abuse.

If the arguments in these four major reports from the U.K. the U.S., Canada, and the U.N. sound at all familiar, that’s because you have probably sought out the work of gender-critical/sex realist feminists from around the world who have, for years now, been arguing that harm is being done to the rights, safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls as a result of gender identity ideology, including the loss of female-only spaces and the intrusion of males into women’s competitive sports and prisons, as well as the incautious pursuit of medical interventions for patients too young to provide informed consent. If, however, this perspective is new to you, then don’t blame yourself: the debate is rarely reported in a balanced fashion by major news media, and often misrepresented by progressive governments.

You also likely haven’t found any gender-critical books in your local library, because librarians have, by and large, refused to purchase them in the name of “social justice” and “preventing harm”, through what is known in the professional literature as the practice of pre-censorship or shadow-banning materials to which the librarian may hold personal objections. For example, I live and work in Winnipeg, Manitoba—by Canadian standards a major metropolitan area—where it is simply impossible to borrow a copy of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters—Abigail Shrier’s 2020 investigation into the massive increase in young girls seeking gender transition—unless you care to drive more than 40 kilometers to the town of Otterburne to visit the library at the faith-based Providence University College. According to the WorldCat catalog, only 561 libraries in the world hold a copy of Shrier’s book, which The Economist hailed as one of its “Books of the Year” for 2020—by conventional standards sufficient warrant to have librarians consider it an essential purchase for adult collections. The same pattern may be seen in the anemic holdings of other such well-known titles:

• Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021) by Helen Joyce (365 libraries)

• Material Girls : Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2022) by Kathleen Stock (282 libraries)

• Gender-critical Feminism (2022) by Holly Lawford-Smith (113 libraries)

• Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation (2021) by Julie Bindel (73 libraries)

• Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of the Madness (2023) by Miriam Grossman (202 libraries).

(By way of comparison, Maia Kobabe’s frequently-challenged [but among librarians fiercely championed] 2020 memoir Gender Queer is held in 1,819 libraries worldwide).

It should be noted that collection decisions where ebooks are concerned may be consortial in nature, so attributing “shadow-banning” practices to any particular library isn’t my intention. Still, it is not too much to say that, broadly speaking, gender-critical/sex realist perspectives have basically been suppressed in publicly-funded libraries; indeed, they could fairly be described in Foucauldian terms as comprising a form of “subjugated knowledge”, that has been (in the words of conflict studies scholar Richard Jackson) “dismissed from the field as unscientific, nonconceptual, naïve, inferior and below the required level of erudition” (167).

Why should that be? While a full discussion of the heated discourse in support of and opposing gender-critical feminism/sex realism is beyond the scope of this essay, we should at least familiarize ourselves with the basics of this perspective according to those who espouse it.

What is Gender-Critical Feminism?

The core of gender-critical feminism is the position that the rights of women are sex-based—that is, premised in the physical and immutable reality of biological sex, not in abstract, idealized, metaphysical, or postmodern notions of “gender identity”, or of sex “existing on a spectrum,” or originating in a “gendered soul.” In this view, the inherent salience of this inescapable physicality is essential in explaining and understanding the oppression that women have always experienced in male-dominated societies. As Holly Lawford-Smith writes in her book Gender-Critical Feminism:

Sex was key to every explanation offered for the origins of women's oppression, whether it related to their reproductive capacities or to their comparative physical strength or to their sexuality. It was also a key feature in every explanation of the mechanisms by which women's oppression is sustained, however it got started. Babies are channeled into sex roles depending on what sex they are observed as being. Children are socialized according to socially constructed ideas about gender that are attached to people on the basis of sex. Sex is a necessary ingredient in gender because it tells us what it is that the social meanings are attached to. There is no way to eliminate or displace sex--as some of those committed to gender as an identity want to do--without a massive loss of explanatory power (p. 47).

According to gender-critical feminists, any attempt to eliminate biology from consideration makes it difficult or impossible to articulate the human rights of women. Mindful of this, the Women’s Declaration International’s Declaration of Women’s Sex-Based Rights sets out the gender-critical agenda in nine Articles—many of which reference declarations of the United Nations, and two of which (I would argue), are directly relevant to the mission of publicly-funded libraries, which is why I include excerpts (with emphasis added):

Article 1: Reaffirming that the rights of women are based upon the category of sex

Article 2: Reaffirming the nature of motherhood as an exclusively female status

Article 3: Reaffirming the rights of women and girls to physical and reproductive integrity

Article 4: Reaffirming women’s rights to freedom of opinion and freedom of expression

…(b) States should uphold women’s right to freedom of expression, including the “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media’’. (United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 19 (2)). This should include the freedom to communicate ideas about ‘gender identity’ without being subject to harassment, prosecution or punishment.

Article 5: Reaffirming women’s right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association

States should uphold women’s rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of association with others. (United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights], Articles 21 and 22). This should include the right of women and girls to assemble and associate as women or girls based upon their sex, and the rights of lesbians to assemble and associate on the basis of their common sexual orientation, without including men who claim to have female ‘gender identities’.

Article 6: Reaffirming women’s rights to political participation on the basis of sex

Article 7: Reaffirming women’s rights to the same opportunities as men to participate actively in sports and physical education

Article 8: Reaffirming the need for the elimination of violence against women

Article 9: Reaffirming the need for the protection of the rights of the child [i.e., opposing gender surgeries or hormonal treatments for minors]

We should note how the recent mainstream international reports referred to in the Introduction affirm these positions: the U.N. report directly relates to Articles 7 & 8, while the WPATH Files and the Cass Review address the concerns in Article 9. Most feminist organizations defending women’s right to choose an abortion will align themselves with Article 3. And, as the Declaration points out, the United Nations’ own International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights supports Articles 4 & 5. The gay rights organization LGB Alliance would also stand behind Article 5 in their defense of the right to same-sex attraction and affiliation. The MacDonald-Laurier report on Canada’s prisons addresses the concern regarding violence against women in Article 8, as does the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls.

Furthermore, surely we must as library professionals recognize that Articles 4 & 5 defending the rights of women to free expression, to be able to access and discuss information, and to gather publicly, are also robustly supported by the democratic and ethical commitments of librarianship in both Canada and the United States, as expressed in the Canadian Federation of Library Associations’ Code of Ethics and the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights.

In other words—and all other things being equal—the principles of belief set out in the Women’s Declaration are not in the least radical and correspond with the stances of major, mainstream institutions. Even ten years ago these precepts would have seemed entirely conventional and non-controversial. Yet the books that have been advancing these very arguments are not widely available in public and academic libraries, needlessly restricting the ability for the public to be properly informed about this debate.

While the meager holdings documented above do not necessarily constitute long-term harm to the public interest per se, as additional copies could be purchased tomorrow to fill these gaps, I would argue that the real long-term concern for librarianship is that the entire debate around intellectual freedom and library neutrality has in recent years been badly deformed by the profession’s sweeping, unquestioned adoption of the hyperbolic and baseless rhetoric surrounding these titles—specifically the accusation that they comprise “hate” literature.

The Attacks Against Gender-Critical Feminists—and the Response from Librarians

Gender-critical authors such as J.K. Rowling, Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel and Abigail Shrier, as well as organizations including Fair Play for Women, Women’s Declaration International and Let Women Speak have been vilified and condemned in the press and on social media as “TERFs” [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists], “bigots”, “anti-trans”, “transphobic” and “far-right” (despite nearly all of them identifying with the political Left); while their books are decried as “hateful”, and they are forced to endure repeated rape and death threats at the hands of the more extreme activists. Philosopher Kathleen Stock decided to resign from Sussex University after enduring three years of harassment and death threats. A particularly gruesome example occurred on October 12th of this year, when a meeting of the LGB Alliance UK was disrupted by gender activists unleashing 6,000 live crickets on the attendees, essentially an act of biological terrorism targeting gays and lesbians, yet the incident garnered no response from Stonewall or other organizations ostensibly dedicated to protecting their interests. As Megan Murphy and colleagues described in an open letter to the Canadian Legion after it capitulated with an apology to gender activists for hosting her event,

Meghan Murphy, for example, has been threatened with violence for nearly a decade for speaking out in defense of women’s sex-based rights. She has received death threats, been stalked, and has been attacked in public. She requires bodyguards, security, and a police presence almost every time she speaks in public as a result. This is not an uncommon experience for those of us who are critical of gender identity ideology and its harms. It is the norm and it is shameful. Tactics employed by these activists include: intimidation, threats of violence, threats of sexual assault and rape, targeting employment, actual physical attacks, and criminalization. They target women in particular, knowing we are vulnerable.

(For a disturbing sense of the misogyny being directed at gender-critical feminists, view the gallery at the Terfisaslur website—if you can stomach it).

(One of the more PG-rated images documented at Terfisaslur.com)

As we saw in the Articles of the Women’s Declaration International, no part of the gender-critical agenda involves in any way or capacity the expression of hatred or animosity directed at trans-identified people, nor does it advocate taking away their basic human rights. If it did—if (for example) Megan Murphy was, in fact, spouting hatred and vitriol and other dehumanizing rhetoric in library meeting rooms—then, yes that would warrant legal scrutiny (Canada, unlike the United States, does have a hate speech exception in its speech laws). But that has not been and is not the case, as may be verified by simply watching her many videos online. I’ve followed this debate closely for nearly five years and observed feminist writers and speakers repeatedly express compassion for persons experiencing gender dysphoria and affirm that they deserve the same basic human rights as everyone else. Yet, gender-critical arguments are continually and consistently misrepresented, with the authors and speakers condemned for “spreading hate,” their beliefs even linked by some scholars—on the most tenuous grounds—to white supremacy and “neo-fascism.” As Megan Murphy puts it, these accusations are not only

defamatory, but they are chock-full of medical misinformation; ideologically driven, with no basis in fact or science; and hyperbolic, inserting motivations that only exist in the imaginations of the authors. The aim of these activists is to frighten people into compliance by implying we aim to harm rather than help (and to simply have open, honest debate), bullying organizations into cancelling our events, denouncing our group, and refusing future bookings. This behaviour is authoritarian [and] undemocratic.

Nonetheless the incessant repetition of this rhetoric—which has (I will repeat) inspired actual death threats—has found a receptive audience in librarianship, despite women’s freedom of expression and peaceful assembly being closely associated with the conventionally-understood democratic values and ethics of our field. And yet, many librarians have taken it upon themselves to gatekeep so-called “transphobic” content and speakers in their libraries, frankly admitting—almost as a matter of pride or principle—to having not read (for example) Irreversible Damage, nor have any intentions of reading it, yet are still able in utter confidence to condemn it as “misinformation” and “transphobic.” (In fact, it would appear that some critical cataloger associated with the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section assigned the book the subject heading “transphobic works”).

Professional antipathy towards gender-critical feminists has translated into open advocacy. In 2020 the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians penned an open letter essentially siding with opponents of Megan Murphy’s appearance at Vancouver and Toronto Public Libraries by agreeing that “intellectual freedom was used by TPL leadership as justification for the decision to promote an event that was experienced by many as a continuation of societal discrimination against transgender individuals and communities". Another “Open Letter to the [Canadian Federation of Library Associations] Board On Intellectual Freedom”, signed by librarians from across the country decried the “three position statements put out by the CFLA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee since 2017”.  The signatories conflated the CFLA’s support for intellectual freedom in Canadian libraries–which argues for the freedom to read books like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage or to hear controversial speakers like Meghan Murphy--as a defense of the materials and speakers themselves. The signatories claimed that “using Intellectual Freedom only to defend transmisia does not reflect the views of many in the CFLA’s affiliated membership”, even though the CFLA’s three position statements do not defend transmisia (i.e., aversion towards or hatred of trans-identifying people) and pass no judgments on either the book or the speaking events, except to state that they are controversial.  (It should be noted that, contrary to the assertion in the letter, the CFLA has a strong record of championing intellectual freedom in support of a wide range of materials and events, not just those which have been [inaccurately and unfairly] labeled as “transmisia”). In 2023, the London (Ontario) Public Library cancelled British academic Joanna Williams’ speaking event with the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship owing to her gender-critical views, while an event on fairness in women’s sports at a California library branch was shut down in-progress by a library director (previously discussed on this Substack).

While surely undertaken with the best of intentions and with a view to care and compassion for the rights claims of a vulnerable group, this professional and institutional allyship in reality co-exists uncomfortably (whether recognized or no) with an equal disregard for the rights claims of women and the same-sex attracted, and must ignore (and certainly never disavows) the constant expressions of some fairly hideous misogyny and homophobia on the part of that group’s more extreme activists.

Such resolute certainty and partisanship regarding a matter of public controversy is indeed remarkable. In his 2024 book Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations, Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell characterizes this level of certainty as doxaholism, or an addiction to “the feeling of righteousness that comes from unassailable conviction” (p. 83). For the average unaffiliated individual, doxaholism certainly constitutes an epistemic vice; for the public-facing professional, however, especially when acting in concert with other professionals and the organizations that represent them, doxaholism risks undermining that profession and the public trust in it. In this case, the “feeling of righteousness [and] unassailable conviction” on the part of so many activist librarians has manifested in a determined refusal to learn—and to deny the opportunity for others to learn—the arguments that gender-critical feminists hold and promote.

I believe all this has represented a significant relinquishment of professional responsibility.

Five Failures of Professionalism

1. A failure to serve the public interest
   On its own terms, the debate over the right of women to be recognized for their sex-based status in the law, in public spaces, and by other institutions in society (including corrections) concerns everyone; there is decidedly a public interest in ensuring this debate is an informed one, for it affects the legal status of half of humanity. What’s more, the matters addressed by gender-critical feminists are driving electoral politics in the United States and Canada, are being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2024, are the subject of a fraud investigation by over 20 states against the American Academy of Pediatrics, and are now before the U.N. General Assembly. How one feels as a librarian towards these matters is quite irrelevant: there is a strong public interest at stake justifying the widespread availability of the titles listed above. In a broader sense, the transparent functioning of venues for democratic discourse (like libraries) is also a matter of general public interest. In this sense, our profession has let down the public by limiting access to relevant information and speakers, and in bypassing normal procedures (viz. collections and spaces) in order to do so.

2. A failure to represent the interests and perspectives of contending parties (“taking sides”)

   By purposely avoiding the purchase of this literature, or through the cancellation of room bookings featuring gender-critical speakers, activist librarians are openly siding with one contending party (i.e., gender identity activists) against another stakeholder group—one whose interests and arguments are (as we have seen) actually fairly mainstream and conventional.

3. A failure to facilitate dialogue, thus exacerbating conflict and polarization

   As a publicly-funded institution, the library has an ethical duty to represent multiple points of view to permit contending parties to make their voices heard by setting out their claims in a public forum in a manner conducive to dialogue and negotiation. By not facilitating such dialogue through collections and spaces, activist librarians have not just failed to facilitate dialogue, but have actively exacerbated the already intense polarization (referred to by Dr. Cass) by contributing to the mischaracterizing, heated rhetoric of “hate” accusations—accusations that are, as we’ve seen, fueling threats of violence against authors, and which our profession has failed to condemn.

4. A failure to defend authors against threats of violence and death

   I’ve written elsewhere on this Substack about the perils of “taking sides” in librarianship; in this case (and I can’t stress this enough) we are siding with activists who, at their most extreme, are regularly threatening authors with violence, rape, or death, but as far as I know these reprehensible actions have never once been disavowed by a library organization, or raised as an intellectual freedom issue. If authors writing on any other controversial topic were collectively subject to the sort of threats as are gender-critical feminists, to the point of routinely requiring bodyguards to appear in public, our professional associations would have long ago condemned this violent rhetoric, and championed the rights of these authors to publish their works, giving prominence to their books during Freedom to Read Week and Banned Books Week. That we have committed all these failures may be owed to a…

5. A failure to adhere to professional principles, ethics, and commitments

   The ALA Library Bill of Rights holds that “Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation” and that “meeting rooms [should be made] available to the public…on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.”  Similarly, the CFLA Code of Ethics states that

   Librarians and other information workers are strictly committed to neutrality and an unbiased stance regarding collection, access and service...Librarians and other information workers distinguish between their personal convictions and professional duties...Librarians and other information workers have the right to free speech in the workplace provided it does not infringe the principle of neutrality towards users.

   In this case, these principles are being either ignored or rejected. The cumulative effect of this professional and institutional activism is such that it has become very difficult to discuss how it appears to have fundamentally undermined our once principled commitments to neutrality and intellectual freedom, and to representing the public interest through diverse collections and public speaking events.

Conclusion: Beyond Professional Doxaholism

If it seems that I am “taking the side” of gender-critical feminists, it is only in the interest of leveling the playing field, and countering the troubling mischaracterizations that have been levelled against them both from within and without the profession. I am, in fact, seeking to restore a measure of professional and institutional neutrality and a commitment to intellectual freedom regarding this debate. One should certainly feel free as a library worker to disagree with and oppose gender-critical feminism—its advocacy for abortion rights being only the most obvious point of contention in the culture wars—but it should be on the basis of its contents and on its own merits, not on hyperbolic ad hominem accusations against its advocates. We should as information professionals be facilitating debate, not foreclosing it.

To date however, beneath the professional discourse surrounding this issue (and its implications for intellectual freedom) lies, I would argue, an overall failure to inquire—a studied and confident incuriousness born of conviction; that is, doxaholism. Instead, contrary views are routinely demonized without any due consideration, then expunged and ignored.

Yet this is precisely the sort of epistemic disposition that we are supposed to be trained as professionals to both argue and guard against. Navigating contention issues is supposed to be our area of expertise.

Society and educational institutions grant us as librarians the social license to teach students to think critically, to consider many different perspectives on issues, and to seek out alternative sources of information. What is it, exactly, that we are claiming to “profess” as professionals, if we are so willing to selectively ignore not just our principles but the members of our user communities who are asking for their voices to be heard, and their concerns addressed? Acting with such prejudice towards a particular point of view risks our social license as professionals, the permission granted by the public to act in their interest. For these members of the public, shadow-banning controversial materials concerning gender ideology results in a situation where—as fired Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library CEO Cathy Simpson argues—the “‘freedom to read’ has come to mean the freedom to read what certain librarians have decided you should have the freedom to read.”

If we as professionals are supposed to accept this state of affairs with equanimity—and I think the reports from the U.N. and other respected organizations described in the Introduction should make that difficult or impossible—then it may be appropriate to ask if the damage that has been done to librarianship is, in fact, reversible.

[I would like to thank my colleagues at Heterodox Academy Libraries for their helpful comments and suggestions for this essay].

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1. Citations to external sources removed for readability.