Quick update: a group of us will be meeting with the CEO & Chief Librarian Åsa Kachan, Collections Manager Dave MacNeil, and Debbie LeBel, Senior Manager of Access on Tuesday at 3:30 via video conference.

I will be accompanied by some members of the community as well and will update everyone. I'm not extremely fond of private meetings on these things but I am hoping this can be the opportunity to help management at the library understand why this book must be removed from circulation.

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One of the more subtle issues at play in this book is the idea that there is an increase in transgender people.

It's important to realize that the language we have today is relatively new. Even in the 40's the few academics who were studying the LGBT community saw everything as existing under sexuality and were not talking about gender.

It was during the 40's as well that the academic field of sexology, along with many other sources of minority media and knowledge, was the victim of one of the most well-known destructions of knowledge. Book burning by nazi demonstrators included the burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (a sexology institute) destroying decades of research. [1]

This event is often cited as the reason for the preservation of all knowledge. But the preservation of all knowledge does not require unimpeded access to explicitly hate-based media during a time when that overt hate against transgender people is continuing to traumatize and kill trans people around the world, including Canada. [2]

And it's important not to assume that just because something is not overt that it is somehow not bigoted. An influential piece of literature for the gender-critical movement was J. G. Raymond's "Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery" In which she writes:

"I believe that the elimination of transsexualism is not best achieved by legislation prohibiting transsexual treatment and surgery but rather by legislation that limits it and by other legislation that lessens the support given to sex-role stereotyping, which generated the problem to begin with." [3]

This statement explicitly informs a method of eliminating transgender people through the restriction of our existence. This method is reflected in the bathroom bills, and sports bills in the USA and the single-sex spaces movement in the UK.

Thank you for continuing to support this campaign, please continue to share with your friends and family. 

[1] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lgbtq-institute-in-germany-was-burned-down-by-nazis

[2] https://theconversation.com/transgender-hate-crimes-are-on-the-rise-even-in-canada-121541

[3] https://www.susans.org/wiki/Technology_on_the_Social_and_Ethical_Aspects_of_Transsexual_Surgery