Transphobic twitter is ablaze with news that a home counties library service has introduced a new mascot: Tala the Storyteller, a brightly coloured alien.
Hertfordshire Council (Tory-controlled) confirmed that Tala the Storyteller is a “bright, vibrant creature” and “the star of Hertfordshire libraries” for a series aimed at catching the attention and imagination of toddlers and babies. Tala’s creators, Emma Phillips and Eva Povey, said they were inspired by the children’s artwork at library workshops.
“They helped us to understand what children liked best in a creature,” they said in a statement.
The Bookstart Bear is being withdrawn nationally and “gender critical” activists including Maya Forstater are pretty sure the replacement is part of the library world’s trans agenda.
Forstater tweeted “A mother w her baby daughter @HitchinLibrary @HertsLibraries Rhyme time (aimed at 0-5 year olds) messaged me: ‘Book Start Bear has been retired and replaced with Talia, a ‘trans’ bear, with they/them pronouns.’ ‘I cannot express how upset I feel. Why do children need this?’”
Hitchin Library, one of the county’s libraries, hit back with a response. “Just to confirm — Tala isn’t trans, they are an alien.”
The Council later released a statement:
“In the absence of a gender for this alien creature, we simply use gender neutral language when talking about them to the public,” they added.
The Internet mob reject Tala the Storyteller and want the Bookstart Bear back to protect children from the horror of not knowing their storyteller’s gender.
Bookstart is BookTrust’s early years programme. Every child in England and Wales gets a free Bookstart pack before they are 12 months old and again aged 3–4 years. There are also black-and-white booklets for newborns and dual language books. The programme includes Bookshine for children who are deaf, Booktouch for children who are blind or partially sighted and Bookstart Star for children with conditions affecting their fine motor skills.
The pilot for the programme was initiated in Birmingham in 1992 and involved 300 babies. The project built on previous research which identified the significance of reading with very young children. The research found that Bookstart children began school with significant advantages. With increased funding for early years under Blair the programme grew. By 1999, many local authorities were eager to participate in the Bookstart programme and by March 2000, 92% of local authorities had joined the programme.
On Friday 17 December 2010 it was announced that the government would cut its entire £13 million annual grant to BookTrust’s English bookgifting schemes. After a public campaign the government announced it would negotiate with BookTrust on renewal of the funding. BookTrust continues to be supported using public funding by Arts Council England but with significantly reduced funding.
Cuts to bookgifting, library and children’s centres closing seems a far better reason to be angry than a library service not gendering its alien storyteller. Since the last Labour government the UK has lost thousands of librarians, hundreds of libraries and 30% of library funding.
Oddly the gender warriors appear not to have noticed that the Bookstart Bear wasn’t gendered either. In some authorities kids or librarians named and gendered their local bear but nationally the bear was not referred to by any pronouns, merely referred to as Bear. The Bookstart Bear is in fact two bears, the child bear from Bear’s Reading Adventure and their adult carer also called Bookstart Bear. Neither were gendered in the many books and games about the family. Trans bear representation was not the initial point of the genderless bear, though is an additional advantage.
The bears were intended as cyphers for all children and all carers. The message of the gender neutral mascot was reading is not only for boys or only for girls, mums and dads should do bedtime stories. Whatever your gender, reading can help you be cleverer, happier and more empathetic.
So why did Tala upset transphobes in a way the Bookstart Bears didn’t? One possibility is that in their brightly coloured dungarees and woolly hat Tala sort of dresses like a queer university student, which may have ruffled some feathers. Another is that the moral panic paranoia is so great that transphobes see every new thing as an attack by the trans agenda. In particular from libraries, which have been central to the culture wars.
The anti-universalist and anti-expert and anti-stance of populist movements implies an antipathy toward institutions conveying knowledge. Add to this that your librarian might be offering your children knowledge you do not want them to have.
In the US, local book banning is so widespread the library community created Banned Book Week, an annual event around the freedom to read. According to the American Library Association, the most challenged book of 2021 was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a memoir about what it means to be nonbinary. Other books on the most-challenged list include Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
In the UK the focus has been Drag Queen Storytime and Black History Month events. Thanks to Hertfordshire Libraries the library fightback against the right’s attacks has a mascot.
