since the acceptance of gay rights id say trans rights are where gay rights were in the 60s and it’s going to be another 20 years or so before it’s commonly accepted …
I think that with social media and the ubiquity of information access (both good and bad), things will change a lot faster than they did in the 60s.
We do have a generation growing up with the idea that being trans is normal. I didn’t know anyone who was (openly) trans until I was an adult. My daughter is growing up with one of my closest friends (who is also in her life) being trans, and it’s just “whatever”, nothing notable.
I expect that in the next decade (the '30s) it won’t be that big of a deal.
Yes, but I’m not even counting my students. Between extended family, neighbors, co-workers, etc, I’m already well over a hundred.
Thank you for supporting your son, that is really cool to hear. Personally I really do care more about those sorts of experiences than what the media has to say, and I think many others do too, so. maybe I should ignore the media a bit more.
The Illinois House of Representatives has passed a bill prohibiting libraries from banning books. This bill apparently spawned from Gender Queer being pulled from shelves.
As an Illinois resident, I applaud the sentiment behind this bill … but I wonder if it also precludes libraries from refusing to stock books that we on the left abhor. If Scott Adams published a Dilbert book that said all LGBTQ people are groomers and “normal” people should remove them from society, would a library be punished for banning it?
In general, public libraries do not exercise editorial control over the content of the books on our shelves. The vast majority of public libraries in the United States affirm the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Statement, which affirms the right of Americans to read what they wish to read and the duty of Libraries to provide access to those materials.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean we must stock a copy of every book - we make editorial decisions based on budget and space constraints. But if there was a reasonable level of demand among our patrons for that anti-LGBTQ+ Dilbert book, yeah, we would have it on the shelf. As a personal example, my old library had a series of “historical fiction” children’s books written by Rush Limbaugh. They are exactly as bad as you might imagine. All we librarians would have been utterly delighted to remove them, but… They had a really solid checkout rate. They were in-demand among our patrons, so on the shelf they stayed.
The fact that most libraries have “challenge policies” that allow the public to object to a book and get it removed is a failure of Librarianship ethics. It’s a compromise that we have to have because we’re publicly funded.
OMG.
Thanks for the informed perspective. So is it accurate to say libraries have a fair amount of discretion about selecting what gets in, but once something is in they should be able to resist efforts to take it out?
(Apologies if this is a hijack from the trans-bashing topic.)
This is called “collection development” and it’s a whole area of study in librarianship (it also happens to be my area of focus!) The absolute bare bones of it is that library collections should be developed so as to best meet the needs of the persons using that library. So if I am developing collections at a small Tribal College library (which is the case now) then I would not select (by which I mean “purchase with library money”) Scott Adam’s hypothetical gay-bashing book, nor would I keep it on the shelf if I found it there, or accept it as a donation. I would make these decisions not because the content of the book is objectionable, but because it is not useful to the patrons and purposes of the library.
Conversely, if I am a public librarian doing col. dev. in a public library in a deep-red city or town that also happens to be home to the Scott Adams Fan Club Headquarters… Yeah, that population is probably going to want that book. It would be my ethical responsibility as a librarian and my duty as a steward of public funds to buy that book using library acquisitions money and keep it on the shelf, and to vigorously oppose any attempt to get it removed on the basis of its content.
I say all this as a practicing librarian with a Master’s degree in Library & Information Science (okay almost, graduation is in May!) and as a super duper lefty trans lady.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance, and for your dedication to doing such an important job with impartiality. And congrats! /hijack
Of course, while I’m sure librarians do a good job of gauging what the public in their community wants, they must make mistakes sometimes. If you put a book on the shelves that isn’t actually in demand, then you’ll see in your records that it almost never gets checked out, and so is a good candidate for removal, but what about errors the other way? Is there a standard process for petitioning the library to add a book they don’t have?
You can always donate a book. That doesn’t mean that they will put it on their shelves, but it does mean that they don’t have to decide if it is worth purchasing.
Whether or not trans-bashing politics have succeeded in winning votes for the Republican party, they have succeeded in making life difficult and dangerous for a lot of trans people and their families right now.
Yeah, the people behind this don’t see it as “failing”. It’s hurting those they want to hurt.
Yeah, most public libraries will have a request form. To be clear - we tend to be really good at getting what our patrons want. Staying in tune with what people in our communities are reading is a big part of the public col. dev. job. But if we don’t have an item that someone asked for, we’ll make a note of it and investigate to see if it would be worth acquiring. That itself is a balancing act! If someone with a weird niche interest asked for a big expensive book that probably nobody else would want, well… We probably won’t get it. But if it’s an item with reasonable likelihood of general usage, we will!
At my former library we also had a “patron directed acquisitions” process. The State Library gave us a grant to basically let patrons directly request items. The item would get bought through Amazon and shipped to the patron. When the patron was done with it, they returned it to the library and we’d evaluate whether to catalogue and shelve it or sell it through our Friends of the Library bookstore.
Apologies for the continual off-topic! Y’all think an “I’m a librarian, ask me anything” thread would be a good idea?
Yes, please.
All of this controversy swirling around what books are available or not available in school libraries has had me rolling my eyes from the very beginning of when it blew up the news (I think it was sometime last year, although I don’t doubt it’s been an ongoing issue for years if not decades.) Everything is out there online and kids can and will access whatever they want. It’s totally idiotic for these parents to work themselves into a tizzy because their kid’s school library has a certain book, and it’s also kind of equally idiotic for people to be up in arms that a school library doesn’t have a certain book. Everything is online. Everything can be found. Kids are experts at finding contraband, taboo, the forbidden fruit - they’re fucking EXPERTS at it.
And these parents are making sure that when they DO find it they will have NO guidance or advice as to how to take it.
Your eyes will really roll at this: