I wanted to do something a bit more substantial today, discussing the narratives emerging about censorship.

It's important to recognize a few critical points here. the first is that minority communities do not have the power to censor anyone. The state however does, so it's reasonable that people are worried about the request for removal to be a case of censorship.

I do not believe it is, and I would like to clarify why.

1) The library hosts access to the internet where any and all books are accessible. This campaign is not asking the library to block access to the book through the internet or any other steps that would border on censorship.

2) The library only hosts about 1 million (1,000,000) books. In 2016 the estimated number of books in the world was 134,021,533. so the Halifax public library holds about .007% of all books published. are the other 99.993% of books being censored for not being in the library? Removal of a book places it in the same position as the vast majority of texts in the world, so does that mean that 99.993% of books in the world are being censored by Halifax public libraries?

The library needs to have reasonable limitations, for non-fiction it makes sense to make sure that the content within them is at least based on legitimate science. we can discuss how to keep hate out of the library but that is a bigger discussion.

3) This book presents misinformation, not just divisive viewpoints. misrepresenting the findings of a study, which is known for its badly designed methods, as a source of data that can be applied to everyone.

In academic studies, it is important to be able to decern whether findings can be generalized to other groups, communities, societies. not only can we not generalize the findings of this study but its original conclusions made assumptions about trans youth based on the views of parents who frequented transphobic websites.

The fact is this isn't censorship.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/85305/how-many-books-have-ever-been-published