Delivered by Zoom. Cost £1500 per session, plus VAT.

Written by Caroline ffiske; published 24 March 2022

Last month, the Telegraph reported that the British Library is introducing pronoun badges for its staff. Voluntary of course. Stonewalled? Why ask?

According to the Telegraph, ‘Internal documents’ have been circulated to British Library staff explaining that making assumptions about gender can send a “harmful” message “even if correct”. 

Will the day come when the British Library puts these 'internal documents' on permanent display to record the mass cowardice and gullible conformity displayed by our great institutions in the face of gender ideology? I hope so.

Curiosity piqued by the Telegraph's reporting, I made a Freedom of Information request asking the British Library what other advice it was taking from Stonewall. Sure enough, the results showed that the Library continues to dish out £2,500 a year to be part of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme. 

Familiarity with Stonewall meant I thought I knew what to expect. A recent version of Stonewall’s ‘Workplace Equality Index’ criteria says that workplace policies should avoid gendered language. Men who self-identify as women should be able to use women’s toilet facilities. Staff should be allowed to carry passes identifying them as different genders on different days. Workplaces should consider removing ‘gender markers’ from all systems - unsex us all now, why not? All the usual stuff that complacently seeks to obliterate the material reality of our sexed lives and bodies, which impact how men and women live and orientate around each other every day; and which is of elementary significance for women’s safety, dignity, and privacy.

What I wasn’t expecting to see, was the British Library paying Stonewall to deliver advice on how its security and front-of-house staff should deal with women who know that sex is real and matters. What one might call "How-to-tackle-a-Terf" training. 

Here are the training scenarios that Stonewall proposed for the British Library:

“A protest forms on the street outside the library. When your manager speaks to them, they tell you they oppose the inclusion of trans women in the exhibition. They have brought placards and a megaphone.They are handing out leaflets to people entering the exhibition telling them that the exhibition oppresses women. You have been asked to support by keeping the protestors within their allotted protest area and minimising the disruption to library visitors. How would you approach this task? 

You are patrolling the exhibition and a visitor comes to you letting you know that someone is wearing a t-shirt that is offensive to trans people while walking around the exhibition. What action would you take? 

A member of the public approaches you to tell you they have just used the toilets and there are stickers all over the doors which have anti-LGBT messages on them. What would you do?

You are working on the floor of the exhibition. A group of people with tickets enter the exhibition and after ten minutes they unfurl a banner that reads ‘sex not gender’ and then sit down around it. What do you do?” 

Delivered by Zoom. Cost £1500 per session, plus VAT. History does not relate whether these precise training scenarios, proposed by Stonewall, went ahead.

Something did. There was much email back and forth in late 2020. Culminating in: “Someone with the screen name [blank] has joined this call and is being a bit disruptive. Someone else has questioned whether they work at the British Library. I wonder if you have a way to check and if you do not we can remove them”.  Shout out to the heroic Terf in the front-of-house team at the British Library.

Let’s try to imagine what the training session might have been like. 

“How would you handle the protest outside? Tim? You would do what you always do when there is a protest? Great stuff. Moving along…

What about the offensive t-shirt? Your thoughts Tania? Ask them to button up their cardigan? Oh really good. They refuse? Bob is asking in chat how the t-shirt we’re illustrating here is offensive. He says that surely a woman is an adult human female. Bob, can we take that offline? … Good bye Bob.

Let’s look at stickers now. Tim would use soap and water to remove them. Jenny would alert the cleaning staff. So would Tony. James…? James would alert the cleaning staff... Some excellent material coming through; really good best-practice. Thanks guys. Let me catch up with my notes - I don’t want to lose any of this. We can share this with other Stonewall champions. [£1500 a pop.]” 

That the British Library engaged with Stonewall about this material is absurd. People have a right to protest. The security staff at public institutions are trained in how to deal with protests. Balancing and managing the rights of protestors is technical and specialist. It is something about which Stonewall is highly unlikely to have more expertise than your average security firm. Yet they charge £1500 for a Zoom session? This feels like pure grift to funnel yet more public money to Stonewall.

On the other hand, it feels profoundly disturbing. There are many men and women who know that sex is real and that it matters. They are concerned about an ideology, promoted by Stonewall, which seeks to preference self-declared 'inner gender' over sex, in the making of law and the ordering of public life. These people are allowed to make their views known using the usual forms of protest accepted in British public life. Yet the British Library seems to be singling them out for silencing. What is the basis for this? Misogyny? Or institutional cowardice and gullible conformity from another of our supposedly great institutions, too afraid to challenge Stonewall? 

There is other concerning material from the British Library, revealed by FOI, but somehow it pales in comparison. 

The British Library has a Women’s network which is ‘inclusive’. Have as many LGBTQIA+ days and networks and policies as you like, but, seemingly, women must have nothing that is just their own.

The British Library says that it does not ask for the sex of job applicants - only gender identity. Well, that will put off applicants who don’t believe in the concept. Talk about gate-keeping. Keep Terfs off the staff. Keep Terfs out of exhibitions. Pincer movement complete. 

Is the British Library for everyone, including those of us who know that sex is real and that it matters? Perhaps gender critical men and women should just not turn up? Or then again, perhaps we should. Why waste good training?