Submitted 17 hours ago by okwithmydecay@leminal.space to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Here’s the problem - book bans swing both ways.
Whatever justification you use to get books like this out of the library will inevitably be contorted by conservatives to ban books on healthy transitioning.
IDK what the solve is here, would love to hear folks thoughts. Move it to the fiction section? Staple a disclaimer inside the cover?
Let people read whatever book they want and make up their own minds. Libraries aren’t supposed to be a “ministry of truth”
The right doesn’t need the left to do something to do it, they just do it. Reform is already tried to do a ban against books with ‘transgender themes’ (this was later revised to adult transgender books after backlash). If we’re going to not exercise power, it should be for something more than a fear the right will also do it, because the right doesn’t care and will do it anyway.
Why not? Kids are dumb, so when they say they want to change gender it doesn’t mean they really need that. Some do, others just “have the phase”. Like with goth clothes, reading poetry, etc.
So the book might be useful if written well.
About the author…
In March 2022, O’Malley was slated to speak at an NHS conference on gender dysphoria. The event was cancelled following complaints by NHS whistleblowers, researchers, and trans rights activists, who accused a majority of the speakers as having a “record of extreme prejudice towards trans people”. Open Democracy said the speakers had “close links to proponents of anti-trans conversion therapies”.
On 10 May 2022, TD Mick Barry raised issue with O’Malley’s invitation to the [education] conference, referring to a Twitter Spaces conversation in which she stated “I don’t think you need to give empathy at all, none, zero. I think I should because I’m trying to understand them” when asked why woman should have sympathy for who they describe as autogynephiles.
LGBTQIA+ activist Izzy Kamikaze also shared link to the released audio. O’Malley has sent a legal letter to Barry accusing him of defamation and sent similar language to Kamikaze for sharing the link
In 2022, O’Malley appeared in a video produced by the Ickonic film company, which is largely owned by antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke
(The space-lizards KKK guy)
In August 2025, the Irish Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy published a piece in which they criticised O’Malley and Genspect as holding an “anti-trans stance” and wanting to marginalise trans people, saying that psychotherapists needed to be alert to disinformation. In response, O’Malley initiated a legal case against them and the writer of the article for defamation.
David Icke
KKK
Wait what? What does David Icke have to do with the KKK? Did I miss something?
If someone is able to find out they aren’t actually trans, isn’t that a good thing? Having doubts about gender while growing up might be a new normal we’ll have to learn how to handle, there will be some people that are cis and there will be some people that actually have gender dysphoria and transitioning would be in their best interest.
Their goal has always been the total non-existence of trans people. They don’t actually care about whether it’s the right choice for someone or not, they simply do not want it to happen at all.
FishFace@piefed.social 17 hours ago
The book sounds harmful, but is it the job of libraries to pick books according to such a criterion? That question was going to be rhetorical, but now I think about it, I genuinely have no idea if public libraries have some charter or other that would restrict what kind of books they hold.
I would be more concerned about books on woo-woo health stuff like homeopathy - I’m sure there are books in libraries that have the effect of discouraging people (including parents) from using alternative medicine instead of medicine.
BTW, 58 libraries is about 2% of the total libraries in the UK.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 14 hours ago
On the one hand, you don’t really want to give people the power to decide what books are available. Assholes would use that to remove queer books, for example.
On the other hand, that power is already implicitly in place. There’s finite space in a library, so they must choose a subset of all possible books. I’d want to know how the existing processes work before suggesting changes.