'The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht'
The co-editors of 'The Women Who Wouldn't Wheehst' - Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn - overturned a ludicrous decision to ban their book from the National Library of Scotland's centenary exhibition after threats were made by trans activists.
Has the NLS learned its lesson - will these trans cranks and bullies now be investigated and dealt with appropriately?
The jury is still out.
We, our authors and the readers who nominated us have been vindicated, but we would much rather these painful events had never happened. We are still dealing with some of the reputational damage this episode has caused us. We also remain to be fully reassured that the library’s senior management has taken on board the seriousness of the investigation’s findings.
The report sets out how the senior management of a significant national institution, including its chair, shockingly allowed their decision-making to be compromised by activists on the staff. In doing so, it says, they lost sight of their professional responsibilities and legal obligations — of the public interest, in effect. The intervention of those activist staff is described by the independent advocate as “threatening and inappropriate”. It remains unclear if they will face any consequences for this.
• Staff threats led to removal of gender-critical book from library
In an interview with Front Row on BBC Radio 4, Amina Shah, the national librarian, denied that the library had failed to stand up to threats from staff, when the report details exactly that, and instead described the actions of the staff concerned simply as “people with lived experience who were putting over their perspective”.
That characterisation risks sending a worrying message to staff with other perspectives and experiences.
We are also disappointed that in the same interview Shah was not clear that our book’s description, in her words, of “violence, aggression, anger that had either happened online or in real life” was all directed towards our authors, and women whose views they share. We are concerned that she expressed no regret for using this as a reason to exclude our voices. As one of our authors, Jenny Lindsay, has said, we have been “harmed for speaking about the harm of speaking out”.
We welcome the library’s proposed training on ethics and freedom of expression, though many will find it surprising that any staff selected for posts in Scotland’s national library need this. We would like to be reassured that this training will be mandatory for all those involved, at any level, in removing our book from the exhibition.
This sobering report arrives as the library acquires a new chair. Particularly in the light of Shah’s comments to the BBC, we would strongly urge the board to reassure itself that the library’s management fully understands the seriousness of the findings of the investigation and to take a close interest in the follow-up actions, to be sure that discrimination like this cannot recur, simply less visibly. We too would like to move on from this, but this requires a degree of reflection on events that we are not yet fully confident has occurred within the National Library of Scotland.
As those who have followed events in recent years will know, this is not an isolated event in Scotland’s cultural landscape. We also hope this report will mark a watershed in the management of Scotland’s cultural institutions more generally. It’s time all those privileged to have any role in running them remembered that they hold them in trust for all of us.
Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety are co-editors of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht
