The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a group that views itself as a “radical feminist organization,” wants to hold an event at the Seattle Public Library, but the library is considering the complaints of another group that calls WoLF a “hate group,” and that group is —
The Gender Justice League, which KTTH Seattle host Jason Rantz terms a “far Left LGBT group,” is upset because WoLF’s event, titled “Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity,” intends to offer “a critical analysis of gender identity.”
Rantz notes that WoLF dislikes instances where biological women are disadvantaged by trans-women. Thus the Gender Justice League ranted, “The end result of a hate group using the library as a venue to ‘critique’ the existence of a minority group creates a hostile environment and is unacceptable.”
The Gender Justice League wrote:
We recently found out that an anti-trans organization has booked an event at the Seattle Public Library with the express purpose of arguing to take away legal rights for trans people.The library has put out an immediate response and are continuing to look at their options for the situation. We will be talking with them and recognize that there are a number of complicated factors that they have to balance, but the end result of a hate group using the library as a venue to “critique” the existence of a minority group creates a hostile environment and is unacceptable.
The Gender Justice League added a threat:
The library, the city council, the mayor, and the city government as a whole needs to understand consequences if they sit back and allow discriminatory harassment to take place in their own spaces unchallenged.
Rantz adds, “Tobi Hill-Meyer, co-executive director of the GJL, calls WoLF a hate group because, according to the (Seattle) Times, ‘their stated purpose is to critique the existence of trans people and in this current climate that’s a serious threat.’”
SPL’s chief librarian Marcellus Turner, seemingly taking the Gender Justice League’s complaints to heart, stated:
We have been working to get up to speed on the implications of this event as they relate to our legal responsibilities, our role as a public institution, and our role as a safe, socially conscious space. We have heard from patrons who believe we should not let this event happen in a Library space due to the group’s views. We have heard from others who say that not allowing this event to happen will endanger the Library’s founding principle of intellectual freedom.
As a library valuing intellectual freedom, inclusivity, and community respect, our leadership is considering every option to ensure we respond to concerns about this event thoughtfully and in line with our values. Controversial groups like these can test our limits as democratic centers of free speech and intellectual freedom, as well as our limits as a united community and organization. I hope you can recognize the difficult situation this has created for us.
WoLF described their event like this:
Over the last several years, transgender activism has made sweeping gains. From local school boards to the Democratic Party to legislatures around the world, proponents of this ideology have succeeded in positioning “gender identity” as the social justice issue of our day.
But are the claims made by these activists actually true, or even coherent? What does it mean to say that people can be “born in the wrong body”? Does the concept of “gender identity” break down stereotypes about the nature of men and women, or does it reinforce them? And what about the rights of women and girls?