Scotland’s national library removes gender-critical book after staff complaints | The Telegraph

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has removed a gender-critical book from an exhibition after staff complained.

The library removed The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by feminists including JK Rowling about their fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID laws.

The book was selected to be included in a major exhibition celebrating the library’s centenary.

But Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and the NLS chief executive, decided to remove the book from the exhibition after coming under pressure from the library’s LGBT+ staff network, who called it “hate speech”.

The network warned its inclusion would cause “severe harm to staff” and said it would have “no choice but to notify LGBT+ partners of the library’s endorsement of the book”, according to documents released under freedom of information (FoI) requests.

But the two women who edited the book wrote to Ms Shah accusing her of censorship and “cowardice” for having “capitulated to what we can only describe as threats from within the library to disrupt the centenary exhibition”.

They noted that the women who contributed essays to the book included campaigners who won April’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not women under the Equality Act.

Source: Scotland’s national library removes gender-critical book after staff complaints