The bookshops battling bigotry

There’s a good piece in Bookriot by Alice Nuttall about the bigoted bullshit many independent bookshops experience; it’s usually because they’re supportive of LGBT+ rights and trans people specifically.

Despite the fact that the shop promotes women’s writing and has made huge strides in ensuring that little-read women authors are given the prominence and acclaim that they deserve, The Second Shelf was deemed anti-feminist for its decision to include all women, rather than solely cis women, on its shelves. The abuse faced by The Second Shelf mostly took place online, with transphobes writing negative reviews despite having never visited the store, or bombarding the shop’s Twitter account with hundreds of hateful messages.

As ever, the people doing it are usually supporters of, and often tacitly supported by, supposed champions of free speech and critics of “cancel culture”.


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