I’m a school librarian in a major UK city and I wanted to write to you about what is going on inside education at the moment. The final straw for me came when I received an email from the (US) School Library Journal about their trans and NB spotlight with the line “J.K. Rowling’s recent transphobic tirades on social media”. And check out the line-up on the Zoom panel!
Enough is enough.
I will admit that several years ago I was pretty full-on with my alphabet-soup allyship and then I got peaked by Mumsnet when I had my children. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
My issue is with how the indoctrination has seeped into books and materials unchecked.
Recently I was being nosy on a secondary school’s website and discovered their library’s LGBT section was made up of “Some Girls Bind”, “Being Jazz”, and “The Trans Teen Survival Guide”. That was it. Nothing else for the LGB kids.
Meanwhile, JKR is Satan for standing up for women and girls. It is painful reading discussion board threads written by librarians questioning what they should do about the “problematic author.”
I’m worried that I’ve made this much, much worse by promoting this propaganda dressed up as YA fiction for years. LGBT History Month? Here, have this book telling you being a lesbian is bad and you’re probably trans.
I’m scared that at some point the trans ideology train is going to come for the “forbidden” books in my library. Will my Head tell me I need to remove all the Harry Potter books? What about the non-fiction books that tell these girls the biological truth about periods and puberty?
Librarians were struggling to keep our jobs before Covid-19 and now it is even harder.
Are librarians really going to poke their heads above the parapet if it means they might be marked as “transphobic” and made unable to get a job in a school again?