I don’t normally have that much problem with drag acts, provided that they are in the right place at the right time and in the right context. A drag act in an adults only pub or club is fine and I’ve even supported drag acts getting up on stage in front of thousands of random people and defending free speech. However, because drag is often sexually transgressive and mocks the sexual mores of the mainstream, it is not something that I believe is suitable for children.

Holding Drag Queen Story time events in British libraries is not, as one of Britain’s major library organisations, Libraries Connected (formerly the Association of Chief Librarians), ‘the same as pantomime dames’ dressing up and reading to kids. Drag queens do not primarily exist as general entertainment figures with a long cultural history in the UK, as is the case with panto dames, but could quite easily be seen as a type of sex worker engaging in performative queerness. For this reason I believe that whilst there is little issue with a panto dame reading to children, that does not apply when it comes to drag queens. A panto dame is an entertainment character and is rightly seen as such whereas a drag queen is engaging in an inherently sexualised performance no matter how toned down it might be for a younger audience.

There is a lot of justifiable concern out there that the purpose of bringing drag queens, many of whom have a history of putting on decidedly adult acts for adults. These concerns are mostly as I can see based on blurring the boundaries between adult and child and also blurring the boundaries between men and women and promoting the gender ideology to children. I believe that these concerns are valid and should be listened to by library services but that doesn’t appear to be happening.

Thankfully despite the fact that some of Britain’s major library organisations and local library services have been captured by the gender identity cult, there has been a growing amount of resistance from parents and other concerned Britons to the whole concept of Drag Queen Story Time. A report about a Drag Queen Story Time event in Reading in Berkshire showed that some parents along with other Britons are not going to tolerate a type of show that veers far too closely to grooming children to accept things such as the indoctrination of children with adult’s controversial beliefs and age inappropriate concepts, that which has previously been seen by the majority as unacceptable.

The Telegraph said that at the first of the many Drag Queen Story Time events that are scheduled to be held across the country faced protests with the drag performer having to be escorted into the library building by police. The event was further disrupted by two women who had bought tickets to the event so that they could protest inside the library and accuse the performer and the event itself of being a grooming event. Now these particular protestors, going by the excerpts from their social media accounts shown by the Telegraph appear to be Sovereign Citizen / Freemen on the Land / pseudo-law types, who I do not support because their arguments are normally bollocks. However on this occasion, like a stopped analogue clock that is correct twice a day, they’ve chosen the correct thing to get angry about.

But objection to the concept of Drag Queen Story Time is not limited to the pseudo-law nutcases, the objection is much wider than that and I suspect that the attention given by the Telegraph to the pseudo-law backgrounds of the protestors might have been an attempt to neuter the arguments about Drag Queen Story Time. Objections to Drag Queen Story Time is quite wide and not confined to those who will turn out for any and every vaguely libertarian sounding demonstration. The criticism is coming from far and wide and encompasses feminists, those on the political Left as well as the political Right, people with mainstream religious beliefs, parents who are concerned about indoctrination of children as well as those who have a general interest in the safeguarding of children.

Frank Furedi writing in Spiked Magazine has recently talked about the growing unease about Drag Queen Story Time among adults and about the negative effects it could have on children. Mr Furedi said that some sections of those in authority had bought into the ideas promoted by the gender identity cult and have ‘lost sight’ of the distinctions between childhood and adulthood.

One of the things that most concerned me about Mr Furedi’s article was his commentary on what library groups such as Libraries Connected are doing. He said that in recent webinar held by Libraries Connected there was conversation about how to deal with or rather fend off by using obfuscation any parental objections to Drag Queen Story Time.

Mr Furedi said:

Recently, a webinar was organised by national body Libraries Connected, for library staff to share advice on ‘managing controversial events’. The more than 100 librarians participating in this webinar were told how to handle angry parents worried about the sexualisation of their children through drag events. Reportedly, one of the speakers suggested that parents and protesters could be fooled if the term drag queen was replaced by pantomime dame. The librarian in question, from Cheshire West and Chester, told the webinar that ‘we’ve always said pantomime dame because we don’t want protesters outside our building’.

This shows quite clearly in my view that these librarians who have been captured by the gender identity ideology know that what they are doing or planning to do would be unacceptable to many parents. They also know that parents are likely to object to children being indoctrinated into the gender identity cult by drag queens. The answer to this problem according to some of the librarians, which is one that is both chilling and arrogant, was to try to mislead parents into believing that there was nothing wrong with these events by changing the descriptor from ‘Drag Queen’ to ‘Pantomime Dame’. These librarians KNOW that parents mostly don’t want these events and they also understand that these events cross a lot of red lines that people have and they are seen, rightly in my view, as indoctrination rather than educational events. But, rather than accept that the parents might have a point and that drag queens might not be the most appropriate people to read to small children, the response of the librarians is to lie to parents about the nature of both the events and those running them.

After reading the piece by Mr Furedi I went and looked at the website of the Libraries Connected group and found that they are promoting not just Drag Queen Story Time in libraries up and down the country but are also heavily involved in promoting LGB and Trans issues including a lot of stuff aimed at children and young people. However the webinar which Mr Furedi speaks appears to have either been removed or been hidden or otherwise not on public view on the Libraries Connected website. A search of the site finds only one reference to drag queen story time and zero reference to anything entitled ‘managing controversial events’ a search term that should have led me to some of the information that Mr Furedi referenced. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Libraries Connected group has realised that Mr Furedi’s revelation that some librarians are openly lying to parents about the nature of these drag queen story time events, casts their organisation in a bad light and therefore they have therefore removed anything to do with ‘managing controversial events’ from their website.

I’m a firm believer that libraries and librarians should primarily be concerned with providing access to knowledge and to do so without bias or favour or partiality. What Libraries Connected and those libraries that have signed up to drag queen story time and similar events are doing is a world away from that ideal. What they are doing is not impartial and they are doing it with a lorry load of bias. The division between male and female, boys and girls and adults and children exist for good reasons. Males and females are different because we have different roles in reproduction and the division between adult and child is more often than not there in order to protect children from adult situations that they are neither mature enough for nor ready for. For these librarians to put on events that deliberately blur the lines between male and female and adult and child is wrong. It confuses children and may make them more vulnerable at some later date to predatory adults or the dishonest blandishments of the activists and acolytes of the Cult of Trans.

I’m glad to see that these drag queen story time events are being subjected to public scrutiny and protests. I don’t believe for one moment that the motive for those who promote them is much to do with the promotion of reading, I think that it’s much more to do with promoting the cult of trans, even in the face of growing parental objections and heedless of the damage that this cult may do to the children who are being indoctrinated. The justifiable criticism of these drag queen story time events is growing and I suspect that there will be many more protests against them. Where I see this going is that protests against drag queens reading to and indoctrinating children will come not only from those who are politically engaged or have particular and particularly odd philosophical views. It’s quite likely that as the anger grows about these drag queen story time events then resistance will come from ordinary parents frightened at the idea that their kids might end up suffering the nightmare future of mutilation, sterility and a ruined life that has been the fate of too many children who have been misled by the promoters of the cult of trans into believing that they can change sex.