Well, well, well. Back to Scotland’s self-identifying ‘newspaper’, which has planted itself at the centre of a row over the delisting of a gender critical book from a national library exhibition. Women’s rights campaigners flagged concerns after The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht – a selection of gender critical essays – was removed from the National Library of Scotland’s Dear Library exhibition, after having been previously selected. The Times ran the initial story, titled ‘censorship row as library bans gender-critical book’. The National then took it upon themselves to claim this wasn’t true – insisting the National Library had ‘debunked’ accusations of censorship. But Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper doesn’t appear to have examined the facts all that thoroughly – and has even been accused of defamation over its piece. Crikey!
Women’s rights campaigners flagged concerns after The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht was removed from the library’s exhibition, after having been previously selected.
For the institution’s Dear Library display, the public had been asked to nominate books that had helped shape their lives. A selection of these would then be included in a ten-month exhibition celebrating the library’s centenary. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht received twice as many nominations required to guarantee inclusion in the display, and its selection was assessed using equality, diversity and inclusion criteria, according to emails seen via Freedom of Information requests. Internal memos outline why the book was to be included in the display: multiple people put it forward, it was to be one of 200 books ‘not being platformed or elevated above others’ and that the removal of the book from the exhibition list would prompt ‘an accusation of censorship’. Consequently an email was circulated that confirmed The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht was to be included in the exhibition.
But not everyone was willing to accept this reasoning. The library’s internal staff LGBT network mounted a campaign to remove the gender-critical tome from the selection. In one email, a staff member queried whether ‘a non-fiction work advocating for racist, homophobic or other discriminatory and exclusionary viewpoints’ would have passed vetting and been selected for the curated display. Some even claimed that the book ‘essentially promotes hate speech to a particular’. Pressure piled on Amina Shah, the national librarian, who eventually caved in to the outrage. For its part, the National Library of Scotland said in a statement that while 523 books had been nominated, only 200 could be displayed, adding: ‘Anyone can visit our reading rooms and access this book as well as the 200 other titles that were not selected for display.’
The National was quick to jump on accusations of censorship by the book’s authors, Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn – and even released a video in which one of their reporters attempted a fact check:
You may have heard that a gender critical book has been banned from an exhibition by the National Library of Scotland. Well, it hasn’t. It’s not true… Editors have claimed their book is being excluded after pressure from staff. They’ve called it censorship… They said the book was singled out by staff, who they say had threatened to disrupt the exhibition if it was included. But here’s the truth. Their book is one of 200 others not to have been selected for the exhibition. The book is in the National Library. Anyone can read it. It’s just not in a showcase celebrating Scotland’s literary milestones, which is a curated selection, not an open mic.
It seems to have escaped the attention of the paper’s sharpest minds that the book, er, was initially included before being subsequently removed due to pressure – with there being email evidence to back the development up. Hunter Blackburn has claimed the journal’s video is defamatory – effectively accused the book’s authors of lying – while Dalgety has urged the newspaper to apologise. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh?
