The feminist book too ‘dangerous’ for Scotland’s National Library

Scotland’s cultural gatekeepers seem to care so much about our safety, they have decided which books are permitted to be celebrated, and which must be hidden away lest they make a pronoun person cry.

The National Library of Scotland’s centenary ‘Dear Library’ exhibition, running from June 2025 to April 2026, was billed as a love letter to books. Ahead of the exhibition, the public picked their favourites and voted to put The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht into the main display. The book is a Sunday Times bestseller chronicling the grassroots feminist victory against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law. But within hours of the vote closing, the library’s LGBT+ staff network started to stamp their feet. With a wibbling lip, members declared the book ‘explicitly exclusionary’ and warned it could cause ‘severe harm to staff’. They threatened a tantrum – or to ‘notify LGBT+ partners of the library’s endorsement of the book’ – if it stayed on display.

Despite The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht having passed a ‘sensitivity check’, library management began to wobble. An equality-impact assessment was commissioned, which warned the book could ‘be perceived as harmful’. It even claimed it might cause ‘asserted increases in hate crime’ – as though the tome might vault from its display case and give a Glasgow kiss to the nearest man in a frock. Internal correspondence even likened putting it on display to publishing racist material.

Faced with activist outrage and the prospect of upsetting ‘key stakeholders’, National librarian Amina Shah yanked the book from the exhibition – suggesting the National Library now serves its ‘LGBT+ stakeholders’, not Scotland’s readers.

The editors of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety, wrote a letter to Shah this week. ‘Surely, the role of the National Librarian is to ensure the library is a place where ideas, debate and discussion take place’, they wrote. ‘Yet rather than treat this book as a book, you have allowed it to be treated as a dangerous object, not safe for public display.’ They also released a series of email trails proving that the book had been censored. But the misinformation machine has since roared into life to defend the library.

In a video for the National, a reporter tried to debunk the idea that the book had been banned by pointing out that it is still in the reading room – just not on public display in an exhibition supposedly celebrating Scotland’s cultural milestones. This, apparently, is not censorship, but ‘curation’. Meanwhile, Shah herself wrote to all staff to claim the library was not ‘censoring or banning every book’, but rather that it was neither ‘possible or desirable to include every title nominated’. Once again, clearing up ‘misinformation’ looks suspiciously like stirring the well after taking a dump in it.

The irony would be funny were it not so sinister. Works taking the opposite stance on gender identity remain proudly displayed. The exhibition walls are adorned with anti-censorship and pro-democracy slogans, including ‘A library card in your hand is your democracy’, and a message from an unnamed reader promising: ‘I will not censor or seek to ban opinions different from my own.’ Yet a book about grassroots women’s rights activists opposing the excesses of an increasingly authoritarian state has been expunged from the exhibition.

Scotland is known not only as the birthplace of Enlightenment thinkers, but was also infamous for its pernicious witch-hunts. Notably, just days before the National Library caved, the publicly funded Summerhall Arts venue created a ‘safe zone’ for staff ‘terrified’ of Kate Forbes – Scotland’s deputy first minister, who happens to be a Christian with pretty standard socially conservative views. Meanwhile, Glasgow University Union recently refused service to women from Let Women Speak because their gender-critical banners allegedly made staff feel unsafe. The government-funded Edinburgh International Book Festival has also frozen out gender-critical writers, such as poet Jenny Lindsay. This is now standard operating procedure in Scotland’s arts world.

Once upon a time, the views of public servants such as librarians were both unknown and considered irrelevant. Professionalism meant separating the personal from the job. Now, thanks to social media’s culture of exhibitionism, the distinction between public and private has collapsed. Middle-class jobs in the cultural sector – which generally come with modest pay but high status – have become magnets for zealots whose main professional output seems to be policing the ideological hygiene of bookshelves and flaunting their lanyards.

The result is an arms race of censorship, in which public servants signal to their peers that they possess the approved views. What the public thinks – the great unwashed who actually fund these institutions – barely registers. If the staff at the National Library did not like the choices the Scottish people made, perhaps they should not have asked them in the first place.

Stop calling it ‘curation’. Call it what it is: censorship in the service of the cultural elite.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.