BBC: “A council has removed all transgender-related books from the children’s sections of its libraries, its leader has announced.”
It’s Reform, inevitably, and there’s lots of questions about this particular story: my gut feeling is that it’s social media posturing, because the only book I’ve seen cited wasn’t a children’s book and wouldn’t have been in the children’s section of any library. But there is still an important point here:
Creating a moral panic around children’s books is how Section 28 started.
As I wrote in Fierce Salvage, the anti-trans panic is bringing bigotry back to the mainstream:
While hate crimes against the entire community continue to rise, the media and ministers tell the nation to fear the victims of hate, not the people purveying it. And when you listen to the callers and contributors to Scots radio shows or read the columnists and commenters on Scots newspaper websites, something becomes clear: if the Section 28 ballot were happening today, too many of our politicians, public figures and peers would be voting to keep it.
Bringing bigotry back has been the goal of the genital-obsessed weirdos all along.
We’ve been saying for years now that history is repeating: the anti-gay, anti-lesbian demonisation of the 1980s has simply been wrapped in “gender-critical” ribbons. And this is a very clear demonstration that book-banning by bigots, a key part of trying to eradicate LGBTQ+ people, is not just a US phenomenon.