Content Warning: transphobia, racism, gender- and race-related violence

The following post is an expanded version of an email sent to the Intellectual Freedom Committee regarding concerns about the open letter sent to Library Journal with the demand to revoke the Library of the Year award from The Seattle Public Library. You can read the reasons why this demand is made, as well as sign the open letter if you so choose, at https://tinyurl.com/LOTY2020sign.

Hello everyone,

I initially was not planning on publicly responding to this thread. In my private reply to [name redacted], I expressed uncertainty about the appropriateness/safeness of a sub-committee member to comment on the main IFC threads. After reflecting on that sentiment for some time, this is a time where I need to get past those reservations and add yet another perspective in the discussion, procedural formalities be damned.

First, disclaimers – I am another signatory of the open letter. I am also a former employee of SPL (left in January 2019). I will keep my comments about SPL to a minimum, but I want to remind everyone that while MT does have considerable power within SPL and his actions contributed to what transpired in February, he is beholden to the Library Board of Trustees, including Board President Jay Reich. It was the Board that made the final decision to uphold the meeting reservation and not to revise the meeting room policy.

While the legal aspects of Intellectual Freedom (IF) are also in play in the SPL situation, it would be better served in a separate thread. I also do not want to take away from the important work that is being done under the name of IF concerning challenged books. I want to focus on the ethics of the application of IF to meeting rooms. My glimpses into the main IF discourse around meeting rooms has concerned me for some time.

The format that stores and delivers information influences its reception by its audience. In print, digital, and oral culture research, you will find that in different periods of history particular formats had different levels of legitimacy and trust attached to them. The level of trustworthiness of this information was judged partly by how the information was delivered. The written word was not automatically given the same authority or trust found in oral transmission in some cultures; in those cultures, the values eventually changed to grant that trust. (It should be noted that some cultures today still place high value and trust in the oral word over other formats). Even today we see this with print and digital formats – an example is a college professor who demands that their students find and copy a physical, print version of an article when the digital copy is also available. This is due to the level of trust in print over the trust of digital (remember when we all said not to use Wikipedia at all?), but again that trust is changing.

A major difference between a library’s collections and the in-person events is how information is transmitted. The act of reading is “slow” – the reader can go at their own pace. The resource doesn’t demand immediate feedback from its reader. The act of speaking is “fast” – if you are attending a live discussion, there might not be room to reflect, lest you miss the speaker’s next point. Undivided attention is demanded. The speaker or other audience members might engage with you even if you’re not ready. You also get the chance to interact with others in real-time, creating an immediate feedback loop that can be reinforced with continued human interaction.

Both print and oral methods have the element of trust in the information being delivered, but the potential impact is where these two diverge. A print resource can bring strong emotions or move someone to action as much as someone’s talk – the difference is that reading gives someone the time to process, while audience members can enter into the feedback loop without time to process what they just consumed. The more you reinforce the feedback loop, the stronger it becomes.

What does this have to do with the ethics of IF and meeting rooms? Libraries are entrenched in print culture, and with it, the trust of the printed word. In popular culture, the library as an institution is seen as trustworthy in terms of being a place to find “correct” information. I know that we’re all cringing at the use of the term “correct” but we have to realize that our patrons see the library as legitimizer, as expert curator, of the information it provides. We have ourselves to partly blame/thank for this reputation because we advertise ourselves as trusted professionals and “impartial” stewards of information (when in reality humans are inherently biased and true objectivity in Library Science is impossible, but that’s for another thread).

Meeting room events are interpreted as being a part of the library’s duty to curate information. A talk or class held in the meeting room is granted some level of legitimacy with the approval of the event by information stewards. While physical and digital resources are managed through a collection management policy that guides library works in determining appropriate content for the collection, meeting rooms policies give almost no guidance beyond prohibiting certain types of activity, such as charging registration fees or fundraising for political candidates. Meeting rooms under the current IF framework are given much more leeway in terms of the information distributed in those rooms.

The problem comes when we don’t question the assumption in IF that people will research and do their due diligence in coming to their own conclusions no matter the mode of information transmission.  This assumption makes sense when patrons are working with print or digital materials; again, this “slow” act allows patrons the chance to work through ideas that they come across, either on their own or reporting back to a group of their choosing. While there is the possibility of a feedback loop, there are several chances to disrupt it early in the process.

Speeches can be persuasive as printed or digital material, but I’d argue (going back to oral culture) that the impact is greater than these other formats because of the immediate feedback and creation of a feedback loop reinforced by the speaker and other audience members. We also forget that within a marketplace of ideas persuasive ideas can also be deadly ones. A persuasive speaker combined with an active audience feeding into a feedback loop can entrench someone before they are consciously aware of what is happening. This model has even adapted to the digital realm with YouTube, with the speaker creating an active online community in a model that imitates the need for an immediate response as well as reinforcing the feedback loop. The best illustration of this adaptation is the alt-right community on YouTube. Sometimes people break the loop like described in the linked article, but others are driven to act out in real life, often targeting certain people based on the ideas and information provided by these group of speakers. It goes to show how a platform can be gamed to recruit new people into a particularly dangerous ideology, as well as rally existing community members.

Library meeting rooms are not immune to this. Library meeting rooms exist as a platform for hate groups because of the misplaced belief in IF that as long as everyone has a chance to speak, then everyone is treated fairly. The problem is that the group renting the room isn’t interested in dialog – they’re interested in recruiting new members and energizing the base. The group communicates in code – “gender critical” sounds neutral and a reasonable topic for discussion to folks who might be interested in the “debate” promised by the movement, but the phrase is code for the existing base, and a hook to gain new members. The marketplace of ideas embedded in the current set of IF ethics forces people to argue for the right to be recognized to be human, for their very lives. Librarianship’s unquestionable devotion to the marketplace of ideas in meeting rooms is making people plead for their human rights and not to be harassed or even killed because of who they innately are. And when this type of hate speech is held inside the walls of the library, it automatically gains a level of legitimacy because of the inherent trust that the information in the library is curated or vetted by trained experts. This is why giving hate groups space in library meeting rooms is so dangerous – the library is a platform that hate groups leverage for institutional and cultural legitimacy.

You might have guessed at this point that I have a social justice bias, so you might be thinking that the next section calls for the abolishment of IF. That is not the case. There’s still some time to salvage the ethical framework of IF, but the recommendations require a fundamental change from within.

There are many ways that I’ve seen organizations try to do DEI work, only to fail. These same options are not going to be effective here, either. Building a bridge between IF and “social justice” is only a temporary measure if there is only dialog and no follow-up or action. Bringing in someone or a small group to be the “social justice subcommittee” runs dangerously close to tokenism. DEI efforts fail because the people and organizations that create these efforts do not understand that they have to do the work to create a more inclusive environment. The ethics around IF not recognizing the loophole it created for hate groups to use meeting rooms as recruitment and rallying platforms for decades and not adapting to close this loophole goes against the Fifth Law of Library Science. This stagnation itself is an entrenched feedback loop.

There is still hope to get rid of this stagnation if the framework of IF around meeting rooms is willing to evolve to reflect the reality of IF being used by hate groups to legitimize their ideas through the institutional reputation of the library. There are already libraries that have changed their meeting policies to make it very difficult for hate groups to use meeting rooms. NYPL recently was able to cancel a “gender critical” event that was going to be held in their meeting rooms based on their meeting room policy. However, many libraries have not made this change because there is still the IF narrative that an unrestricted marketplace of ideas is best for library meeting rooms. This narrative supported by OIF and ALA is considered the canonical one for libraries to base their policies and practices.

What I’m asking for is a more humane set of ethics in IF surrounding meeting rooms. One that recognizes the differences and realities of print, digital, and oral cultures. One that states that someone’s right to have human rights should not have to be proven by that very person in the marketplace of ideas. One that realizes that hate groups are well organized and subversive, knowing that having the library as a platform further legitimizes their message. One that commits to evolution, and not stagnation steeped in the flawed ideology of neutrality. One that recognizes that the library does not exist in a cultural vacuum and that libraries have an ethical duty to take their part of the responsibility of the harms incurred by their unwillingness to acknowledge as such.

All of this work needs to start within OIF/IFC. If unwilling to do this work, or solely rely on others to do the work, then any effort to humanize the ethics of IF surrounding meeting rooms will most likely fail. We then are stuck in the cycle of more hate groups exploiting the loophole, more protests, more counterprotests, more hate groups exploiting the loophole, etc.

But this doesn’t truly reflect the real cost of all of this has on people’s lives. Back in 2019, Toronto Public Library hosted hate speech denying transgender and non-binary people their basic human rights. Two months later, Julie Berman, a well-known transgender activist, was murdered. While it’s unclear if Julie was at the protests at TPL, I suspect that she at least a role in planning them, given her reputation in advocating for trans rights in the Toronto area. She might have spoken to TPL leadership about their choice to host hate speech. She might have been told that in the interest of intellectual freedom, the speech is allowed in the library and she is always free to protest or request a meeting room to hold her own event at a later date. “The marketplace of ideas is there if you want to plead your case that you’re a valid human being and deserving of rights” – this is the quiet part of the library’s response.

So, when you see people sad, hurt, frustrated, angry, or made about libraries holding hate speech in meeting rooms, they are as such because literal lives are at stake. Giving a legitimizing platform to hate groups on one end and making people argue for their existence on the other end is inhumane and unethical. There are ways to mitigate this harm and to disrupt this cycle at scale. What I’m asking is that those who determine the evolution of the ethical framework of IF to do the work instead of reaching for token gestures or just shutting down.

Content Warning: Transphobia

The following is a written version of my second public statement to the Seattle Public Library Board on January 23, 2020.

At the time of this post, The Seattle Public Library has not cancelled the room reservation for the anti-trans event on February 1st, 2020. A protest is planned at the library from 6 pm to 9 pm on the same day.

Thank you again for the opportunity to address the Board.

I was at the special meeting on January 10^th where the Board met with attorneys and subsequently failed to second a motion to cancel the February 1^st event hosted by a self-proclaimed “feminist” group who will not be engaging in gender discourse at the event but instead engaging in the erasure of human rights of transgender people. In the statement read by the Board right after after the failed motion, the Board declared that they supported both the transgender community and intellectual freedom.

In the statement the Board noted that the Library needs to “[listen] to and [work] with the transgender community”. However, you did not listen to the transgender community when they brought up concerns about the library providing a platform for hate speech that erases their existence and their human rights. You did not listen to the community organizers who reached out to you with offers of assistance in protecting transgender patrons and staff from the effects of this speech. You did not listen to the lawyers and others in the community who pointed out that the existing library policies and the upcoming event itself violates state and local regulations. Why should we believe that you’ll listen when your actions say otherwise?

The Board states that the Library must “maintain its role as a stalwart protector of intellectual freedom”. The Board conflates the principle of Intellectual Freedom with the principle of free speech – libraries already place limits on content and speech by their very nature. The Board seems content with this conflation. That became very apparent after the executive session in the special meeting. The Board President stated before the session that no decision would be made in the closed session, but given that there was a full statement right after the 45 minute closed session most likely meant that the decision was already made before the meeting started.

Libraries are not sacred spaces, as the Board declares in their statement. Libraries are not neutral and they often contribute to systems of oppression in communities. At the same time, though, libraries also provide the opportunity of a place of refuge for those seeking a brief respite from that oppression. The New York Public Library realized this when, last week, they cancelled a transphobic event featuring speakers from the same group coming to SPL. I only wish SPL realized this as well. The Board’s actions have reinforced systems of oppression by giving a platform for hate speech that harms transgender patrons and staff. No amount of words of support to the transgender community from the library or statements about how the library strives to be a good community member will fix that.

Content Warning: Transphobia, racism, violence against transgender and non-binary people, workplace violence

The following is an expanded version of my public statement to the Seattle Public Library Board on December 19, 2019. Versions of this statement are being sent to other library administration and City government officials.

At the time of this post, The Seattle Public Library has not cancelled the room reservation for the anti-trans event on February 1st, 2020.

Hello and thank you for the opportunity to address the board.

My name is Becky Yoose. I worked at SPL from 2015 to 2019 as the Library Applications and Systems Manager. I have worked in libraries for almost 18 years, with over ten of those years as a professional librarian.

You heard many people arguing for and against SPL renting a meeting room to WoLF, a self-described “feminist” organization, on February 1st, 2020. You might have heard arguments invoking intellectual freedom, free speech, and civil discourse.

Let’s start with intellectual freedom. Intellectual freedom was codified into the library profession by the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights in 1939 as a response to events taking place in Europe on the eve of WWII. Comments surrounding IF focus almost exclusively on the materials themselves, but a closer examination of intellectual freedom reveals that intellectual freedom is much more than materials – it’s also about protecting the person accessing the materials from the consequences as a result of that access. Stating that intellectual freedom requires libraries to include any and all material is a dangerous oversimplification of the concept of intellectual freedom. It de-centers the patron aspect of intellectual freedom and makes it an afterthought. In any case, there’s a difference between providing access to a variety of materials without surveilling library patrons and providing a platform for hate speech that endangers the lives of others.

That leads us to free speech. WoLF supporters state that the First Amendment protects the group. While there is no exception for hate speech in the First Amendment, Washington State and the City of Seattle consider speech as a factor in hate and bias crimes, as well as allow for civil actions against those who perpetrate such speech. The City of Seattle also has policies regarding protecting persons from discrimination and harassment in places of public accommodation.

WoLF’s and Murphy’s talks around gender and sex dehumanizes transgender and non-binary people by insisting that they do not exist and that they do not deserve the same human rights as others, like walking down the street or using public bathroom facilities without the threat of violence. Their speech isn’t about discourse or debate around gender identity, it is about intentionally stripping people of their basic rights to exist as human beings. These events are productions to create a coalition of people tasked with actively working against giving human rights to transgender and non-binary people.  Removing the humanity of a class of people is a tried and true strategy of many hate groups, as well as governments and others who hold power, to incite violence against those in that class.

Dehumanizing transgender people has led to increased rates of violence and death compared to the general US population. In 2018, the FBI saw a 40 percent rise in hate crimes committed against transgender and non-binary folks nationwide compared to 2017. Seattle saw a 25% increase in overall hate crimes between 2017 and 2018. This violence disproportionately affects Black transgender women, who already experience dehumanization because of their race.

This accumulates into the last argument that the library is a neutral place for civil discourse. Libraries are not, and never were, neutral. Libraries were used as places to educate “uncivilized” immigrants in the ways of the dominate culture. Libraries are places where racial, ethnic, and other types of slurs are used to describe materials in the library collection. Libraries are where Black, Latinx, and other people of color are disproportionately excluded from the library compared to white people – a recent example of this is the 2018 report by the South Seattle Emerald about SPL’s exclusion practices. Libraries are where transgender people are forced to use a name for their library card that outs them. As with any other cultural institution, the library inherits the biases and systematic oppressions of the greater society.

Claims of neutrality and civility have been used to dehumanize classes of people as well. The writers of the Constitution had a civil conversation that resulted in the Three-Fifths Compromise. Many of the atrocities committed in the name of eugenics were masked by civility of those carrying out said atrocities. The notions of neutrality and civility excuses oneself from the personal and organizational responsibility of invoking harm to those who are at most at risk. It is an immoral stance to take, at best.

I am concerned not only for library patrons, but for library staff as well. 2019 has seen an increase in violence against SPL staff compared to 2018. Staff have been verbally harassed, physically assaulted, and in certain cases doxed and threatened for LGBTQIA+ work that they do at the library. As mentioned earlier, speech that dehumanizes transgender and non-binary people leads to violence against these people. How can SPL ensure a safe working environment for their transgender and non-binary staff if they allow for this type of speech at their place of work? The answer is that they can’t.

The speakers at the WoLF forum are not engaging in discourse or dialog. They are engaging in stripping away the human rights of transgender and non-binary people, including library patrons and staff. This puts both library patrons and staff in danger of harm.

The City has policies in place to protect workers against hostile work environments as well as initiatives to create an equitable workplace for all. The City also has policies protecting the public from harassment based on gender. I ask you to follow these policies and cancel the February 1st room reservation for the WoLF event.

Thank you for your time.

Resources

State and City of Seattle policies

• City of Seattle – Hate and Bias Crimes and Seattle Municipal Code Chapter 14.06
• State of Washington – Bias-based Criminal Offenses – Hate Crimes

Further Readings and sources

• City of Seattle Auditor – Review of Hate Crime Prevention, Response, and Reporting in Seattle: Phase 2 Report
• The Guardian – Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK
• Human Rights Campaign – A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the United States in 2019
• Jane Schmidt – My remarks to the TPL Board
• Jessica Schomberg – Cataloging and Social Justice [Bibliography]
• National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs – A Crisis of Hate and Pride and Pain
• nina de jesus – Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression
  • Related – Extended Crowd Sourced Bibliography for Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression
• Out – BREAKING: Hate Crime Murders Are Highest Ever Recorded by FBI
• Reuters – U.S. transgender people harassed in public restrooms: landmark survey
• Sam Popowich – Intellectual Freedom Roundup
• The Seattle Times:
  • Amid outcry, Seattle Public Library weighs decision to provide venue for ‘radical feminist’ event criticized as anti-trans
  • The feminism I believe in makes the world larger, not smaller
  • Golden Gardens attack survivor: My story was exploited in transgender-bathroom debate
• South Seattle Emerald – People of Color, Especially Children, Most Likely to be Asked to Leave Seattle Libraries
• VAWnet – Violence Against Trans and Non-Binary People

Welcome to the first iteration of my first Twine story – Missteps, As told in two stories [Content Warning: abuse, harassment, stalking, and violence]. Many thanks to the folks who took the time to test a draft of this story.

Missteps is the product of a few projects and explorations during the past few months. This is a simple Twine story, and as I get more familiar with Twine, a second iteration might be in the works. It’s been an interesting experience and one that will continue to be interesting for some time to come.

The material behind the Twine story

The Twine story is inspired by true events where personal boundaries were violated. Some of these events happened to my friends and acquaintances, and some events come from having my own personal boundaries violated. I have been reluctant to write about some of the more egregious violations; it is an unwritten rule to not speak up of such violations, lest you bring yet more unwanted attention onto yourself. Still, I wanted to find a way to publicly discuss this behavior. There are many narratives from those whose boundaries have been violated, and one more story would most likely get lost in the never-ending sea of similar stories.

In thinking of a way to present the narrative, I started to wonder about the motivations of the violators. Some of the same boundary violations continued as the years pass, even when clear boundaries were set. What would make a person ignore such boundaries? Perhaps, instead of telling the narrative from the violated, the narrative would be from the viewpoint of the potential violator.

That is where this Twine began.

Is it a game, quiz, or choose your own adventure?

It would be impossible to try to write a Twine story that would 100% explain the motivation behind people who violate boundaries. There are many reasons why people violate boundaries in which I will not go into detail here. In addition, writing to one particular motivation for the violator will only resonate with a very small part of the audience, limiting the story’s potential impact. The story would have to accommodate different motivations behind potential boundary violations. The story would also have to accommodate the fact that not all violators are intentional – for some folks, navigating boundaries does not come naturally to them.

To achieve these accommodations, the Twine story would need to present each scenario in a way that would make the person self-aware as to why they made the choice to act in such a manner. I could achieve that goal with a point system based on the choices they made, like in a quiz or a game. In the end, the points tally up and the person would fall under one of several score range categories. However, this approach by itself doesn’t make the person stop to think about their choices unless it’s tied to achieving a certain score.

What the Twine story ended up being is more of a choose your own adventure with built-in reflection areas on each action the person takes. Some of these reflection areas happen during the scenario, and others happen at the end when reviewing your choices. There is still a point scale of sorts, but that system is used primarily to determine what types of reflections the person sees at the end of the scenario. By emphasizing reflection, the person is hopefully made to take a bit more ownership of their choices in the story, and the reflections in the story will carry forward after closing the browser.

This story isn’t really a game or quiz – it’s not meant for pleasure, or for fun. While it’s partly educational, it’s mostly an exercise in self-awareness on the part of the person interacting with the story.

Twine as a publishing platform

This is my first Twine story, and it probably shows. The platform shapes how one creates a narrative, and my lack of development experience in Twine did limit what I could do for this story. Nonetheless, I found my way around the basics, and for simpler interactive text adventures, Twine was a pretty decent tool for a beginner. When I downloaded the client, I didn’t know that there were three different formats you can create your story with: Harlowe, SugarCube, and Snowman. This made development a bit interesting when you are looking through documentation and are not quite sure which snippet of code would work in a Harlowe format. I also didn’t fully grasp at the very beginning what strengths each format had. I defaulted to Harlowe, but after reading the small Story Formats section in the Twine documentation, I might need to branch off to Sugar Cube if I want to expand on story interactivity or features.

There are some things that could use more polish with my first story. For example, the end screen can become one massive block of text, but due to the conditionals coded into the end screen, I would have to spend more time creating yet more conditionals to link to different screens. I don’t know if there’s a better way than manually writing said conditions; hence the investigation into SugarCube to see if there’s a function in there that can do this. The reflection areas are on the honor system – Twine does have input functions, but I haven’t had time to explore them, including effective ways in incorporating user input into the story itself. You can do a lot with Twine, which means you can go off in a thousand directions with your story.

As I said above, the experience of creating the Twine story has been an interesting one, both in content and in the platform. I hope you find the story interesting and useful, and maybe learn a thing or two that you can carry forward in your daily life.

Note: I wrote this post last weekend, but have not posted it until today. This was written primarily to get some thoughts out on paper, and not a detailed overview of recent events, nor it was intended to be as such.

Also, the last time I checked the settings, comments are moderated on the blog. They will probably not show up to the public until the evening, when I’m back home from work. I can’t seem to train the cats to do comment moderation for me. Good-for-nothing, freeloading cats…

Here I am, sitting at my computer, processing what happened in the last couple of days. The following is part “going through what happened”, and part me thinking out loud.

How did I get here?

A few weeks ago, Bess Sadler posted on the code4lib listserv with a request that code4lib adopt an anti-harassment policy similar to those that were being adopted by other technology conferences. The initial post prompted many +1s and the anti-harassment policy began to take shape in github.

Then the conversation continued, and after a survey and more discussion, the suggestion for a code4libwomen showed up… and then more discussion. Technically, since code4lib is not a formal organization, anyone could do something in the name of the group, whether there is group consensus or not. However, since we are librarians, and librarians like going through approval processes, sometimes people ask. And when you ask for opinions on the Internet, you’ll get them. On occasion, you might even get one of mine, which is the case in the code4libwomen discussion.

My opinion? A code4libwomen group wouldn’t be effective.

Why? Twofold:

1. While a separate group might be conducive to more women actively participating in that group, if there are no mechanisms to bring that participation to the larger group, then, effectively, the smaller group has segregated itself from the rest of the organization.

Point 1 is more of a procedural issue with the code4libwomen idea that could be addressed with a lot of organizational policies, prompts, and mechanisms that would have to be built into the group.[1]  Point 2, however, happens to be the bigger reason why I found myself not married to the idea:

1. It doesn’t go far enough.

So, let’s say a code4libwomen group does form, and it functions well. Great, but that group only covers a subsection of the population of women in library technology. What about LITA? ASIST? State library associations? And what about those who don’t feel that they don’t belong in either LITA or code4lib? That’s a big group of people who wouldn’t benefit from such a group if that group was tied to an organization that they are not a part of. If we get all the other organizations creating their own groups, then we end up with a hodge-podge of subgroups with varying effectiveness and few chances of collaboration between other organizations. Again, this also leaves out folks who don’t identify with any organization.

And, after Lisa Rabey and I ended up in an IRC channel for further discussion on related ideas, #libtechwomen was born.

What do I think #libtechwomen should be? Here’s what I have so far:

• A place for women to get training, advice, and encouragement in a neutral environment that is not tied to a single organization, so we can include all types from the library technology field: coders, network admins, sysadmins, tech managers, and those who want to learn about any of the above.
• A group that want to advocate for women in library technology. That group is made up of anyone that wants to help – everyone on the gender spectrum – and can partner with various organizations when opportunities arise.

The biggest part for me about my hopes for #libtechwomen is this – that the people who benefit from the group go out and contribute to the greater library technology community. I plan to kidnap people from this group to various code4lib events, because code4lib for me has been a place where I could grow in my skills as well as meet folks who are dedicated to what they do. I know that there will be others in #libtechwomen that will lend a hand to those who want someone to help them navigate an organization such as LITA, code4lib, EDUCAUSE, state library organizations, and so on. The biggest potential benefit from this group is overall growth in participation in library technology by cis and trans women. If we find ourselves with a majority folks in #libtechwomen that never leave the confines of the group, then the group finds itself in the situation that I hoped to avoid in the first place – yet another silo in the sea of siloes in the library community.

Perhaps I’m being too optimistic about this. I haven’t been on the receiving end of any blatant harassment in the library technology community, but I have heard stories of others that have encountered it. Some folks might say that I’m not going far enough with my thoughts on #libtechwomen, and I’m not sure if I’ll be comfortable with some of the directions that people will want to take #libtechwomen. That’s something that I have to deal with, like in any other area of my work life.

Also, #libtechwomen does not directly deal with other groups that are in a similar situation that cis and trans women. I realize that even though I can be an ally, I need to let others take the lead for those folks who decide to tackle those issues for their respective groups. Then again, there’s starting to be discussion about the name of the group, and if the name – along with the focus – should change to something more inclusive to other underrepresented groups in technology. If that discussion comes to fruition and the name does change, I’d support the change.

So, here I am, sitting at my computer, processing the events of the last few days. It might be a while before I’m able to process everything.