From the New York Times opinion section:
I Am Being Pushed Out of One of the Last Public Squares, the Library
July 17, 2023
A stack of brightly colored books labeled “Queer” is surrounded by flames.
By Emily St. James
Ms. St. James is the author of the upcoming novel “Woodworking.”
If the public library is one of the last physical vestiges of the public square most Americans still have access to, the efforts to push queer and non-white voices out of it are efforts to push those voices out of public life. New from me in NYT!https://t.co/GNy6zK2QAW
— Emily St. James (@emilystjams) July 17, 2023
What do real women like more than woodworking?
As far as my childhood self was concerned, the Carnegie Library in my tiny South Dakota hometown was the best place on earth. Once every week, I climbed its stairs and entered a space that smelled of mildew and oak.
Two large rooms stretched off to either side of the librarian’s desk, each subdivided into smaller spaces by old, wooden shelves. A small table bore videotapes and books from the state library in Pierre, titles that our perpetually underfunded library could not afford to add to its collection but wanted to make available anyway.
I grew up in a very white, very rural world, and the library let me know other lives were possible. There, I encountered books by authors like Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou, which spoke of a world I had yet to encounter. Just reading the back cover of something like Oscar Hijuelos’s “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” served as a reminder that there were other ways to live than my own.
I was also a queer girl who lacked the language to explain the feelings I had deep inside of me. Yet at the library, I encountered some of the first people who seemed at all like me, people written about as political activists in magazines like Time and Newsweek, as supporting characters in the occasional sci-fi novel the friendly librarian pressed on me, as curiosities in certain books containing anecdotes about, say, Christine Jorgensen, a World War II veteran and trans woman whose transition in the early 1950s caused a media sensation.
Oh, wow, let me guess … Emily St. James used to be a dude! Specifically, Todd VanDerWerff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_St._James
From 2009 to 2014, St. James was the TV editor for The A.V. Club, helping to build the TV Club, known for criticism of television shows episode by episode. The TV Club, while led by St. James, has been credited with helping build the online culture of television recaps.
What would make you prouder than having been credited with helping build the online culture of television recaps?
In June 2014, St. James joined Vox as their culture editor,[5] going on to become the Critic at Large. …
In 2018, St. James and fellow critic Zack Handlen wrote Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, which was published by Tor Books.[10] …
What’s more feminine than being obsessed with The X-Files?
In July 2020, she spoke out against fellow Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias, following his signing of an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine which called for an end to what it described as “illiberalism”.[11] After a tweet about her criticism by Jesse Singal, one of the letter’s signatories, St. James reported that she’d received death threats. …
St. James came out as a transgender woman in 2019.
And now Emily wants to use the taxpayer dollars to finance propagandizing children into following Emily’s path.
And now Emily is extremely rage-filled that some parents/taxpayers don’t want Emily to do that to their children with their money. How DARE evil parents/taxpayers have any say over what is done to their children/tax dollars by good people like Emily? Emily is one of the Good People, unlike Bad People like you who have doubts about whether Emily should be subsidized by your money to propagandize your children into being poisoned, mutilated, and sterilized to be more like Emily/Todd.
As far as I can tell, virtually nobody gets the joke that Todd VanDerWerff is a straight guy with a fetish that makes him get off on forcing other people to proclaim him a beautiful woman and to try to destroy people like Yglesias and Singal with the bravery to stand up to him. But even the fans of Yglesias and Singal don’t publicly laugh at Todd and explain what’s really going on.
