The Controversy Over Gender Identity Ideology in Children's Picture Books, pt. 3
On the choice between furthering a "bibliogenic" cycle of harm, or restoring the "chain of trust" in librarianship.
[Image: DeepAI Image Generator]
[Approx. 25 minutes reading time]
Introduction
In the previous two essays in this series, I have attempted to explain why the discourse in librarianship (and the major media) around “banned books” concerning gender identity has so badly misunderstood and misrepresented what is going on and what is at stake. Where this controversy is conventionally framed as a backlash against “pro-LGBTQIA2S+ content” and “so-called gender ideology” mostly originating on the political right, I argued in Part One that there is nothing “so-called” about the ideology of gender depicted and promoted in the picture books so often subject to challenges—that it is a fundamentally and unambiguously metaphysical belief system of physical disembodiment (with more than a passing resemblance to the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism), the wildly successful penetration of which into society has depended entirely on a postmodern manipulation of language. Paradoxically, at the same time, nobody can agree on what exactly is meant by “gender identity,” which hasn’t stopped dozens of children’s authors from presenting it to toddlers and preschoolers in picture books as an indisputable fact, and librarians from defending from all challenge their ability to do so. In Part Two, I demonstrated that many of the concerns parents and child advocacy groups have been expressing about the exposure of young and impressionable children to this ideology are shared by a growing number of scholars in the fields of medicine and psychiatry, given the strong probability that cross-sex ideation and social transitioning—especially at a young age—will lead to a regime of lifelong medicalization fraught with risks and based on a shockingly weak evidentiary basis.
Now I turn to our professional context as librarians by arguing that, taken together, the spread of gender identity ideology in children’s publishing (and by extension the education system and society at large), combined with the potential and permanent real-world impacts of its adoption on children’s minds and bodies, and the organized reaction against it from across the political spectrum and by communities of faith, presents us with a profoundly complex ethical, political, and cultural “wicked problem” which raises fundamental questions about our profession, and what it is that we “profess”.
Naming Profession-Induced Harms
In the previous essay, we saw how there is an emerging literature in the fields of mental health and psychiatry which questions if the “standards of care” in pediatric gender medicine are doing more harm than good—if they are, in fact, exacerbating or even causing gender dysphoria. Kenneth Zucker in the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health, wrote in 2019 that social transitioning a child may well lead to medicalization, characterizing this psychosocial intervention as iatrogenic, from the Greek words for iatros [doctor] and genesis [origin]); Zeki Bayraktar in the March 2025 issue of the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy described an “iatrogenic harm cycle” that was perpetuated by “academic pressures, along with political and ideological factors [which] prevent the explanation of the negative outcomes of medical and surgical transitions” (p. 12) and coined the term “iatrogenic gender dysphoria”, while Sarah Jorgensen in her 2023 Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy article “Iatrogenic Harm in Gender Medicine” referred to detransitioners as “survivors of iatrogenic harm” (p. 941). These scholars have shown considerable courage not only in breaking with the consensus in their fields regarding these treatment protocols, but in criticizing their professions’ inability to recognize the harms in question, and their contributions to them.
While the idea of iatrogeny has only recently come to be applied to the matter of transgenderism, the concept has a long history in medicine, showing up in the literature in the1890s and, indeed, lies at the heart of the Hippocratic Oath and its 5th Century BCE promise that patients should “suffer no hurt or damage” at the hand of the physician, who (in its modern iteration) is not to “play at God.” However, by the early 1970s the use of the term iatrogeny had become prevalent enough for engineer and physicist Martin Krakowski to muse in the May 1973 issue of the journal Interfaces about the potential for adopting genesis-inspired language to other professions and their capacity to inadvertently unleash ills onto society. He observed,
Of course, members of other professions and occupations are often in powerful and influential positions to cause harm which they were hired, trained, or elected to cure, prevent or alleviate; and they do exercise their prerogatives. Distinctions between individual acts of malpractice and calamities resulting from the collective skill of a profession are generally as difficult to establish, for contemporary observers, as in the practice of medicine (p.44).
For Krakowski, the important distinction between iatrogenic harm and straightforward professional malpractice is that
“iatrogeny" include[s] all other misfortunes caused in the line of duty while following the canons of one's licensed or recognized profession, or of an influential school within one's occupation (p. 45, emphasis added).
In this vein, Krakowski proposed such new terms as economogenic to describe the deleterious effects of economists on the economy; technogenic the harms of technocrats and engineers on the society and the environment; and scholiogenic those ills “developed, engendered, or motivated by schools, colleges, learned academies, training centers, and by teachers (or merely attributed to them)”(p. 45). It is this latter term that most clearly applies to the phenomenon discussed in Part Two, in particular the accusations levelled by organizations such as Interfaith4Kids and Women’s Declaration International that schools have been intentionally “indoctrinating” children using the curriculum, pedagogy, extracurricular activities, and—of course—books. That Kevin Kumashiro asserted in his 2002 book Troubling Education:" Queer" Activism and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy1 that it was the responsibility of educators to “intentionally and constantly” (p. 69, emphasis added) lead students into crisis over their gender and racial identities so that the child changes how they see themselves in relation to “normalcy” and thus “‘queer’ their understandings of themselves” (p. 64), reveals these accusations to be less a conspiracy theory and more of a description of mainstream pedagogy—especially since his book has been cited in the literature over 1,360 times! It should therefore not surprise us that many observers are arguing that these deliberate, crisis-instilling interventions are causing harm—scholiogenic harm—by initiating or exacerbating psychological distress in children, leading many of them to be subject for the rest of their lives to a medical regime replete with a host of complications, and which even its most ardent supporters are now admitting is under-evidenced.
A Bibliogenic Cycle of Harm?
The instruments of this alleged scholiogenic harm are the very picture books discussed over the previous two essays, and their widespread availability in our libraries. Given that toddlers and preschoolers are not capable of scrolling through tumblr for gender identity-related influencers and content, it seems reasonable to ask: Without these books, would the reach of this ideology have been so swift, profound and enduring? If no, does this not suggest then the possibility of bibliogenic harm? After all, we cannot on the one hand champion reading by declaring that “books change lives” and then on the other deny the possibility that books promoting an ideology of physical dissociation to very young readers who are still forming their sense of the world and skills of discernment may be encouraging them into existential questions that would otherwise never have occurred to them. Of course, untangling from the pedagogy employed in schools and the constant messaging elsewhere in the culture the extent to which the books on their own per se may be contributing to such ideation may be difficult; yet surely it cannot be insignificant.
Linguistically, any discussion of bibliogeny would need to encompass not just the books themselves but also the realm of librarianship more generally, and would certainly entail a reexamination of our profession’s aggressive promotion and celebration of this literature and ancillary programming like drag queen story times, as well as our resistance to any opposition to this literature. What’s more, since our field is intimately concerned with educating the public about the nature of misinformation and disinformation, we may have much to answer for in not only unproblematically collecting so many titles that present to children a contested metaphysical belief system as a matter of fact, but in labelling any alternative perspectives on the matter as “harmful”. In this way, it can be argued that we, as librarians, have our own pronounced role in what Bayraktar (2025) referred to as the “iatrogenic harm cycle”, which goes beyond just the exacerbation of gender dysphoria in individuals to include (in his words) “academic pressures, along with political and ideological factors” which inhibit an honest reckoning with the “negative outcomes of medical and surgical transitions” (p. 12).
Our field offers perhaps no better example of this than Catherine Lockmiller’s 2023 article “Decoding the Misinformation-Legislation Pipeline: An Analysis of Florida Medicaid and the Current State of Transgender Healthcare” which appeared in the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) (also cited under the authorial name K.D. Coldwater). In it, the author extols the evidentiary robustness of the Standards of Care 8 (SOC8) published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) while condemning as “misinformation” Lisa Littman’s 2018 article, “Rapid-onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Study of Parental Reports” and repeatedly dismissing her proposed theory of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) as being “unsupported” in the scholarship. (This is a tad disingenuous: the author neglects to mention the 2023 article by J. Michael Baily and Suzanna Diaz discussed in Part Two, which was retracted by the publisher on a technicality after considerable pressure from activists, nor accounts for how that highly-publicized pressure of “cancellation” would have prevented other interested scholars from raising their heads above the parapets). Lockmiller’s (rather hyperbolic) thesis is that such “misinformation” is funneled through a rhetorical “pipeline” used by “bad faith actors to further systemize transphobia through…the enactment of legislation that criminalizes gender affirming healthcare (and by extension, transgender people)” (p. 751). To dismantle this “pipeline”, Lockmiller/Coldwater proposes that health science librarians need to “apply a critical lens to adverse policy documents” to “help uncover the means by which the authors of such documents rely on misinformation and/or propaganda to lend the appearance of credibility to harmful policies” (p. 757) and ensure that “titles that perpetuate misinformation should be reclassified, placed on request, or withdrawn” (p. 758).
As the kids often say on social media, this didn’t age well. Within a year of publication, multiple published studies had fruitfully pursued research based on Littman’s theory of ROGD, largely defusing Lockmiller/Coldwater’s discrediting rhetoric against it:
Image: Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine
More devastatingly, both Mia Hughes’ WPATH Files report and the Cass Review into the UK’s gender identity services for children and young people had completely pulled the rug out from under the article’s major assertions by unveiling that, far from being evidence-based, the WPATH standards on which medical associations and practitioners around the world had relied upon and referred to with near-unanimity in order to justify their medical interventions on minors were built on little more than an academic echo chamber—or citation cartel—in which “experts” repeatedly cited each other but drew on no actual sound empirical inputs, such as might be acquired through randomized controlled trials. As journalist Christina Buttons explains,
when WPATH and [the Endocrine Society] updated their guidelines, they referenced the same national and regional guidelines that had initially drawn from their recommendations. This perpetuated a cycle in which each iteration reinforced the others, each time without sufficient evidence to support the recommendations. Dr. Cass highlighted the problematic nature of this circular referencing, stating, “The circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”…Their aim wasn’t to boost citation counts, but rather to enhance their own credibility through mutual referencing in the eyes of the public and other medical professionals. Nonetheless, this practice is highly unethical. By engaging in circular referencing, these medical bodies have actively deceived healthcare professionals and the public, leading them to believe in the validity and reliability of recommendations founded on weak evidence.
Lockmiller/Coldwater was dedicated enough in the article to follow up on and interrogate for credibility all the sources cited in a Florida Medicaid Report used to influence the State’s decision to end coverage for “necessary gender affirming healthcare” (p. 753), yet apparently the SOC8 didn’t warrant the same level of scrutiny. As a consequence, an unreliable and ideologically-motivated house of cards was touted as “evidence-based”, while actual evidence-based scholarship (e.g., Littman) was tarred as “misinformation”, of the sort that medical librarians should withdraw from their collections.
Be that as it may, it would appear that, in the intervening two years, even the author would lose faith in evidence-based practice: in March 2025—and under the name Cat Lockmiller—the same author published the article, “False Positive: Transphobic Regimes, Ableist Abandonment, and Evidence-Based Practice” at the online journal In the Library with the Lead Pipe, which characterized the Cass Review as “violence-based evidence making” and arguing that evidence-based practice (EBP)
should be understood as a tool which gets deployed to lend credibility to oppressive policy-making endeavors in the service of extractive abandonment. It is nothing short of the chisel with which a violently anti-trans truth and profit regime is being sculpted.
To clarify, EBP in medicine is actually intended to bolster clinical practice and decision-making through the discovery and use of the best available research, in the conviction that mere
“expert opinion” and “standard practice” are insufficient bases for clinical decision-making because of these traditional elements in medical practice often lag far behind the current best evidence…systematically gleaned from rigorously conduced research…EBM seeks to replace this authority-based model with a scientifically based pragmatic model for medicine (Eldredge 2000, p. 291).
In other words, instead of simply trusting a medical professional’s authority regarding courses of treatment, EBP practitioners seek to engage in further inquiry, utilizing a hierarchy of the best-available evidence, with systematic reviews of multiple rigorous studies at the top, and qualitative inputs (interview, focus groups) at the bottom. One would think this a very positive protocol, and one that lowers risks to patients. And indeed, EBP comprises the foundation of Lockmiller/Coldwater’s JMLA article, its endorsement by the Medical Library Association in its Core Values being cited in the introduction.
Yet, from Lockmiller’s revised perspective in 2025, if systematic reviews could form the basis of the despised Cass Review, then such rigorous practices are to be condemned and abandoned. It would appear that one can use certain evidence rhetorically in defense of one’s ideological project while characterizing that of one’s opponents as “misinformation”, but only until said evidence is no longer capable of supporting that project, at which point it, too, becomes a form of "oppression”. This inverted determination would seem to jibe with Rick Anderson’s observation at The Scholarly Kitchen that
unfortunately, it has become too easy to characterize claims as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, not based on the evidence for or against them, but rather on one’s assessment of the motivations of those making the claims – and on whether they advance one’s preferred scholarly or social or political narrative or discourse…If you believe a proposition is untrue, it’s all too easy to immediately dismiss it as misinformation (or, worse, disinformation).
The failure to critique WPATH’s scholarly credentials is not Lockmiller/Coldwater’s alone, but rather must be shared by medical librarians in particular and librarianship more generally: if any profession should have been able to detect and uncover a citation cartel it should have been librarians. As the world becomes more conscious of the enormous scale of this unfolding medical scandal of pediatric gender medicine—which Mia Hughes likens in the WPATH Files report to the medical profession’s pseudoscientific past embrace of lobotomies (p. 53)—many observers may well wonder why it drew no notice from a profession proudly championing its skill at identifying misinformation, and in instructing others on critical thinking.
Yet, the bibliogenic harm cycle extends still outwards and into our communities, starting with the data we keep.
The Data Problem and a Conflation of Constituencies
The American Library Association confidently asserts in its promotional materials for “Banned Books Week” that “[t]itles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47% of those targeted in censorship attempts.” However—and rather surprisingly—the ALA does not actually make available to the public the data sets on which these assertions are based so that researchers may confirm for themselves the nature of the complaints. According to their Office of Intellection Freedom,
OIF maintains the database for internal staff use, as a means of encouraging libraries to report challenges, and to create awareness of the importance of protecting and celebrating the freedom to read. Because the censorship database does not have the statistical validity demanded by many social scientists and researchers and may be vulnerable to misinterpretation and misuse, we must deny any request asking OIF to share raw data (emphasis added).
As a result, we have no way of knowing the precise nature of the objections filed under the “LGBTQIA+” heading—whether library users are complaining about the presence of gay characters, themes of gender identity ideology, or sexual explicitness. While the Canadian Federation of Library Associations and the Centre for Free Expression do make their data sets publicly available, these suffer from the same issue of aggregation: all challenges that might relate to themes of either homosexuality or gender identity ideology are captured as “2SLGBTQ+”. Even less helpfully, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans on its website contains no public data at all about the reported justifications for the filed challenges, which doesn’t prevent the organization from claiming that challenges “predominantly target[] books about race and racism or individuals of color and also books on LGBTQ+ topics as well those for older readers that have sexual references or discuss sexual violence.” This state of affairs does not just permit the pronouncement of unverifiable claims, it limits our ability as professionals to debate this issue in a comprehensive and rational manner and communicate with members of our communities about their concerns.
But there is another problem: the aggregation of book challenges under the “LGBTQIA+” “LGBTQ+ topics” and “2SLGBTQ+” umbrellas may be championed for being “inclusive”, but it ends up disguising drastically divergent interests. As I have pointed out a number of times on this Substack, many gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are increasingly seeking to distance themselves from some of the rhetoric of gender activism, because erasing the validity and salience of biological sex removes entirely any ontological basis for homosexuality: if there is no such thing as sex, then how can one be attracted to it, either one’s own, the opposite sex, or both? Gay Canadian theater scholar Sky Gilbert puts it bluntly in his blog post ”Is Trans Killing Gay?”
‘No gender’ trans theory may be well intentioned -- but it is an undesirable goal that will never work. And I have to say it. Whatever their intentions, those who call for ‘the end of gender for all’ are being homophobic. Period.
Comedian and satirist Andrew Doyle (who is also gay)—and using his parodic pen name “Titania McGrath”—deftly illustrates the contemporary ideological contortions that follow from denying biological sex, writing at The Critic,
As members of the LGBTQIA+ community, bisexuals deserve to be celebrated and empowered. At the same time, their very existence implies that sex is binary and therefore they are all evil bigots who should be arrested for anti-trans hate.
As a consequence of this profound shift in activism, lesbians in particular have been subject to pressure to date trans-identifying men, or risk being labelled “transphobic” for their “genital preferences.” As a consequence, there is now a movement on the part of lesbians to distance themselves from the trans issue altogether, and the LGB Alliance is providing a voice for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to assert their right to be same-sex attracted. The organization Gays Against Groomers has particularly targeted the what they describe as the “sexualization, indoctrination, and mutilation of children…being carried out in our name” only to be pilloried on Wikipedia for being a “far right anti-LGBT organization” for their efforts. That the “+” also is often positioned to include persons with Disorders of Sexual Development (popularly known as Intersex conditions) further muddies the waters, as such genetic conditions have nothing whatever to do with trans identification.
These distinctions matter a great deal in terms of how we understand and discuss this controversy as a profession, and the media discourse as well. Any effort on the part of librarians to make collections appealing to same-sex attracted young people—by purchasing titles featuring gay, lesbian or bisexual characters—will be seriously undermined by, at the same time, purchasing books that deny the reality and salience of biological sex, an impediment made all but invisible by current data collection practices. By framing all challenges against the picture books under discussion as part of a “rising tide of anti-LGBTQ hate”, we are unable to recognize that many of the criticisms of gender identity ideology come from the political left and from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals themselves.
While it is also true that some of the individuals and groups involved in challenging these materials do tend towards the political right (e.g. Moms for Liberty), the conventional wisdom that criticisms of this literature is simply a “right-wing war against libraries” can’t even be called a gross over-simplification so much as it is a complete misunderstanding of the issues and dynamics at work.
A Broken “Chain of Trust”
In a March 2025 essay at The Federalist Society, author Mark Hemingway accused America’s librarians of having “become a threat to future generations”. YouTube is filled with videos of parents demanding at public hearings that libraries remove titles they deem to be harmful to minors, while protests against drag queen story hours have in recent years become a regular occurrence. And whatever the nature of the complaints, record numbers of challenges are being reported against books in school and public libraries. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that our profession has lost the trust of many of our constituent communities.
One of the things the WPATH Report argues is that, in its heedlessness, WPATH has broken the "chain of trust" in medicine:
In medicine, there is a concept called the “chain of trust.” Doctors must be able to trust that their professional training is grounded in robust scientific evidence because, given the limited time available to medical professionals, it is not feasible for them to thoroughly investigate every aspect (diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment) of every illness). For medicine to function efficiently, doctors must be confident that those who issue practice guidelines have diligently and rigorously evaluated all the relevant evidence for the safety and efficacy of treatments. WPATH has broken the chain of trust in gender medicine. WPATH presents itself as scientific but is in fact an advocacy group promoting risky, experimental, and cosmetic procedures in the guise of well-researched and “medically necessary” care. WPATH is held up as the source of all knowledge about gender-affirming care, but the scientific basis for their recommendations is exceptionally weak (p. 35-36).
Accordingly, a host of other medical and psychological associations and organizations, relying upon the authority WPATH, produced their own statements and standards, which are now revealed to be based on what the Cass Review declared to be “remarkably weak” evidence—clearly a cascading institutional failure, and one that is already having legal consequences: The American Academy of Pediatrics has been named in a detransitioner lawsuit, suggesting that other professional associations may also be in legal jeopardy.
I would argue that we, as librarians, must consider our own role in a "chain of trust" within and without our field. We, too, rely on reputable authors to produce books and articles suitable for public use, publishing houses to publish them, and review journals to make helpful recommendations, which we then depend upon to make purchasing decisions. In turn, we are then trusted by our communities of users to purchase and make available reading materials that can meet their needs, and which meet certain criteria. This is especially true where literature for children is concerned.
In this case, we have touted our status as trusted, credentialed experts to collect, promote, and vigorously defend children's books—some aimed at toddlers and pre-schoolers—that present as indisputably factual a controversial, scientifically unsupported and unfalsifiable metaphysical belief, one akin to those originating in any religious faith. When understood in this way, it’s clear that we've ignored our own selection standards in acquiring them, particularly in such quantity. These standards often emphasize "appropriateness to the intended audience" as well as accuracy and credibility; these criteria are in extreme doubt with these titles.
We need to ask, what is it, exactly, that we “profess” as professionals when the work we do may be implicated in a crisis we have proven so incapable of even recognizing?
Conclusion
In these three essays, I hope I have established that the concerns of parents and other advocates are sincerely-held and genuine, and the potential outcomes of reading this literature real and troubling. First, I explained the ideological nature of the picture books in question, before setting out in Part Two seven outcomes likely to ensue for at least some of the children who consume them, and which many observers find alarming. In this essay, I have named these outcomes as comprising a major component of a larger “bibliogenic cycle of harm”, one that also includes not only the ways in which our professional discourses and scholarship have cordoned off this controversy from open inquiry and failed to recognize ideologically-motivated misinformation for what it is, but also our less-than illuminating data-gathering practices. All of these oversights have served to fuel wholly unnecessary conflicts within and between our communities. We are indeed dealing with a wicked problem, but it is one largely of our own making.
Inasmuch as these essays offer a cautionary criticism of our profession, I do wish to make it clear that I am certain that—queer pedagogists aside—most of the actors involved have proceeded with the best of intentions: neither the authors of these picture books, the publishers who print and sell them, or the librarians who purchase and promote them, have done so with a view to intentionally leading children into existential crises or lifelong medicalization. Everyone has surely acted out of a sense of kindness. What I do believe, however, is that almost nobody involved has sufficiently pursued critical and dispassionate inquiry into the issues at stake, or challenged either their own assumptions or the assumptions of other trusted institutions. In the process, we have, in the eyes of some of our stakeholder communities, broken the chain of trust in our institution.
I suggest that there are eights steps we could take to change the conversation, and engage more constructively with our colleagues and the public at large:
Acknowledge—for all the reasons established in Part One—that gender identity ideology is in fact an ideology, and one about which reasonable objections may be held;
consider objections to literature promoting this ideology are being made in good faith by sincerely concerned parents, and treat their concerns accordingly;
recognize that picture books that present gender identity as a matter of fact about which no debate or doubt is permitted meet the standard of misinformation in that they involve presenting “information as a fact without thoroughly checking that the information…is accurate.” That such misinformation should be aimed at very young children about a matter related to their own sense of self, with potentially lifelong consequences, should be a matter of considerable ethical concern for librarianship;
avoid an ideologically-driven stance on the issue and treat the claims made in this literature the way we would any other: as assertions that must be considered in terms of their appropriateness for young readers and balanced with competing viewpoints;
balance collections on this issue by purchasing and promoting body-positive, sex-affirming titles such as I Am STILL a Girl!: Whimsical Poetry About Serious Girlology by Alice Engel; My Body is Me by Rachel Rooney; as well as Christian-themed works including He is He and She is She (both by Ryan and Bethany Bomberger); It’s Good to be a Girl by Jen and Zoe Oshman; God Made Boys and Girls: Helping Children Understand the Gift of Gender by Marty Machowski; and Elephants are not Birds by Ashley St. Clair;
stop positioning these books as “pro-LGBTQ” and aggregating and discussing challenges to them as “anti-LGBTQ”, but distinguish in data collection between challenges to gender identity ideology and concerns over homosexual themes or sexual content;
admit that we just don’t know what the effects of this literature are, but that a bibliogenic factor in cases of gender dysphoria must be considered a possibility. Given that lifelong medical consequences may be involved in such ideation, further research is urgently required. Establishing the nature of the role, if any, played by this literature in the etiology of gender distress would require qualitative transdisciplinary research that should ideally involve not only librarians but experts from the fields of pediatrics, child psychology and child development; and finally
commit to further dialogue on this issue within and without the profession, seeking both expert opinion and community feedback.
Taking such good faith measures would help to restore the “chain of trust” in librarianship; the alternative, I believe, risks perpetuating a bibliogenic cycle of harm.
References
Anderson, R. (2025). “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Scholarly Communication (Part 2)” The Scholarly Kitchen, April 8th.
Bayraktar, Z. (2025). Iatrogenic Gender Dysphoria and Harm Cycle in Gender Affirming Care. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 1-18.
Diaz, S., & Bailey, J. M. (2023). RETRACTED ARTICLE: rapid onset gender Dysphoria: parent reports on 1655 possible cases. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(3), 1031-1043.
Jorgensen, S. C. J. (2023). Iatrogenic Harm in Gender Medicine. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 49(8), 939–944. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2023.2224320
Krakowski, M. (1973). Anthropogenic ILLs. Interfaces, 3(3), 44-46.
Lockmiller, C./Coldwater, K.D. (2023). Decoding the Misinformation-Legislation Pipeline: an analysis of Florida Medicaid and the current state of transgender healthcare. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 111(4), 750.
Lockmiller, C. (2025). “False Positive: Transphobic Regimes, Ableist Abandonment, and Evidence-Based Practice.” In the Library with a Lead Pipe, March 5th.
Zucker, K. J. (2020). Debate: Different strokes for different folks. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 25(1), 36–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/camh.12330
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Thank you for joining the conversation!
As I stressed in Part Two, “queer” in queer theory has nothing to do with homosexuality, but positions itself politically against anything society considered normal.
Bravo on laying out all the issues with gender ideology so clearly. This caught my attention-- "In this case, we have touted our status as trusted, credentialed experts to collect, promote, and vigorously defend children's books—some aimed at toddlers and pre-schoolers—that present as indisputably factual a controversial, scientifically unsupported and unfalsifiable metaphysical belief, one akin to those originating in any religious faith." It illustrates the thorniness of the issue, because libraries do collect books on various religions aimed at youth. Perhaps the difference is that they are filed under religion and generally understood not to be "indisputably factual."
Michael, thanks for bringing together this summation of the myriad issues (and misunderstandings) caused by gender identity ideology as reflected in children's book selection, and the larger societal implications. You've addressed the whole range of these complexities with sensitivity and nuance--qualities often missing in current discussions and debates about this, or other contentious topics.
I am especially glad to see that you returned to the "chain of trust" concept as central to our field, and how some have abandoned the precept. Good that you also pointed out the misapplication of "misinformation" again, which is an easy label to apply to any viewpoint we don't like--we are beset with the use of term now by leading political figures, media expostulators, and many others. A moratorium on the use of the term would be a boon to better discourse.
Finally, I'll just mention the HxA precept of "Make Your Way with Evidence." You've done a super job here with marshalling strong evidence in the HxA Way. Others in the field haven't, and don't, as a regular practice. They latch into one book, one perspective, as definitive. I sometimes think HxA should amend that precept to "Make Your Way with the Best Evidence" or the highest-quality evidence available, and to use probabilistic reasoning in combination with emerging evidence to make better decisions.