Many TERF authors used dog whistles (or coded language) to signal their transphobia. Some keywords we used to identify TERFs include:
It was exciting to be able to solicit student feedback on the assignment. Our Google Form (still active and available on the front page of this guide) received a wide range of responses from students.
An overwhelming amount of the responses were in support of keeping all materials widely available on the shelves exactly as they are. Some people provided creative interventions similar to our ideas for this project and a small percentage wanted them removed.
Overall, it seemed students found a great amount of value in these materials. We had people share that their ideology was represented in the materials, while others used it for their research on trans and political organizing history.
Library materials serve many purposes, such as:
The American Library Association (ALA)'s Library Bill of Rights explains that libraries should provide materials on all points of view on current and historical issues. Barnard Library holds these books to document the past and current history of transphobia and contextualize it alongside trans resistances.
While some scholars argue that holding both TERF and anti-TERF materials maintain the conversation between these ideas, we do not want to equate these groups. Doing so ignores the fact that TERF organizers leverage power and privilege to oppress trans people. TERFs are a small fringe group that should be acknowledged as existing without uplifting their talking points. The amount of trans scholars, studies, stories, and histories in the collection vastly outnumber the TERF voices.
Barnard Library is always taking on new and interesting projects to see how we can improve upon our services and programs to better meet students' needs. Since libraries have a responsibility to provide connection and community, it is important to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Transphobia is becoming increasingly popular in national politics. Political organizers use the terminology of feminism to mobilize alongside right-wing groups to pursue transphobic agendas. Moreover, across the country, schools and libraries are becoming the target of anti-trans and racist organizing through book banning and book challenges. This project is not to add onto challenges, but to perform an exercise in how to thoughtfully consider the value of controversial titles and consider their place in the library.
This project also gives us the space to explore new avenues of weeding. In librarianship "weeding" almost exclusively refers to the removal of books, which is often equated with censorship. The team did not come into this project determined to throw out all the books! We wanted to audit the materials to see the variety of perspectives, and make a determination about how we can advance the library's mission.
Feminism is always changing, and it is important that we all challenge ourselves to learn and grow within our understanding of it. Criticality does not take away from the importance of a given material, rather it adds to its context. It enforces the idea that multiple things can be true about a given material. These nuanced questions are vital to feminist theory and practice.
Weeding, which means removing materials from a collection, is an important part of a librarian's job. All libraries have weeding and acquisition structures to maintain a collection that is accurate, current, and relevant.
However, critical weeding pushes beyond accuracy, currency, and relevance to ask questions about inclusivity, usage, and the library's values and mission.
Questions in approaching this project included:
Traditional weeding would not work for this project. It would create barriers to people doing personal or academic research on transphobia. At the same time, it does not serve our students to have an abundance of physical TERF materials when that space could be used instead to uplift trans scholarship moving forward.
The list of materials identified as having TERF content is a non-exhaustive starting point to learn more about TERF arguments and identify the major TERF scholars in this subject.
It is not an attempt to "cancel" these scholars, but to provide resources for researchers and scholars to learn more about TERF arguments and research.
Barnard Library supports intellectual freedom, which means that the library holds all kinds of books, including those that are problematic, hateful, and harmful. This does not mean the library holds these views, rather we want students to understand all kinds of perspectives on a given topic. However, some of these books do spread misinformation on trans people while co-opting feminist terminologies.
Josh and Easton created a more comprehensive list for researchers and other librarians to use as a reference guide when working with these materials, so that they may audit their own collections. At the start of this project, there was no such criteria in librarianship; however, Josh and Easton created one to form a list of titles based on Barnard Library's collection. Since this was a labor-intensive project that required Josh and Easton researching book-to-book, there are assuredly more materials that could be considered for this project.
Only so much can be done in a semester! There was more that we wanted to do, especially involving student engagement, but students' attentions were understandably elsewhere during the Spring 2024 semester.
Some projects we want for the future include:
Outside of student engagement, some future interventions included: