“We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources. … We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.”
That’s an extract from the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics for librarians. This first week of October is Banned Books Week, an annual campaign to highlight banned and challenged books, and, according to the same organization, “celebrate the freedom to read.”
As librarians, we oppose book banning and censorship. We take it as our professional responsibility to defend intellectual freedom and individuals’ access to the information of their choosing. And, as librarians, we know there’s more than one way to keep controversial material off shelves. Campaigns to stamp materials as verboten and purge them from library collections are the bluntest instrument for disappearing frowned-upon literature, the most glaring and thus the easiest to be outraged by.
Other methods of censorship are more insidious, passing quietly beneath notice, and too often practiced by library professionals themselves. Both forms, brazen and subtle, must be resisted.
Lately, the censorship debate has centered on books about gender identity, with the bulk of news stories focusing on librarians’ efforts to shield such materials against demands for their removal. Such is the brazen approach to censorship. Now let’s examine the subtle approach.
Searches of the online catalog MaineCat show more than 600 books with the subject heading “transgender” in Maine’s 77 public libraries, and more than 250 in Portland Public Library alone. By our assessment, of the hundreds of related titles at Portland Public Library, only one – Helen Joyce’s “Trans” – takes a critical view of the gender identity movement, arguing that it has negatively impacted the rights of women and the well-being of young people.
Many feminist authors, including Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel and Sheila Jeffreys, have published books critical of gender identity and Portland Public Library appears to have purchased none of them. Nearly all of Maine’s public libraries are similarly one-sided on this topic. Not buying books in the first place is, it turns out, a highly effective way of keeping them off the shelves.
Perhaps you see no problem here, because you disagree with the gender critical or radical feminist view, which maintains that gender is an oppressive social construct engineered to preserve men’s power over women, that biological sex is immutable, and that women’s rights are violated by the admission of males into women’s spaces and sports. This perspective offends you, so you’d prefer it to go unheard. Yet, once unleashed, censorship is a difficult beast to control. The freedom you give it to silence your opponent’s opinion may soon circle around to silence your own.
As librarians, we ask: Are we really fighting censorship if we defend only those books with which we agree? Where is the “freedom to read” in offering access solely to materials that tell one side of the story? Are we opposing censorship, or are merely gatekeeping according to our own biases?
When challenged, champions of selective collecting often argue some version of, “Would you support books in the public library that deny the Holocaust happened, or that promote violence against racial minorities?” These arguments are spurious at best. Libraries have no ethical obligation to provide information that has been established as false by scholarly consensus.
Despite popular opinion, there’s no equivalent consensus on questions of gender identity. Nor does a gender critical perspective advocate violence or any other illegal actions that would reasonably justify its exclusion by a public institution.
As we celebrate the freedom to read this Banned Books Week, let’s remember that when we stock our library shelves only with books we agree with, we become the very censors we proclaim so loudly, and with such professional pride, to resist.
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