More than 600 best-selling authors, publishers, bookstore owners and advocacy groups Wednesday condemned the recent wave of LGBTQ- and race-related book bans in public school libraries across the country.
Over the last several weeks, lawmakers, school officials and parents in at least 10 states — including New York, Texas and Virginia — have sought to rid books about the lived experiences of Black and LGBTQ people from elementary, middle and high schools.
Some who are challenging the books argue that they contain graphic illustrations of LGBTQ sexual experiences or portray an unflattering image of the country’s history with race.
But in a joint statement, signatories — led by the National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of 57 American nonprofit groups that advocate for free expression — called the effort to ban the books an “organized political attack” that “threatens the education of America’s children.”
“Libraries offer students the opportunity to encounter books and other material that they might otherwise never see and the freedom to make their own choices about what to read,” the statement read. “Denying young people this freedom to explore — often on the basis of a single controversial passage cited out of context — will limit not only what they can learn but who they can become.”
The group included more than 50 independent bookstores, nearly 80 advocacy groups, top American publishing companies (including Penguin Random House and Scholastic) and dozens of authors, including bestselling children’s book author Judy Blume.
Books about race, sexual orientation and gender identity have historically been challenged in schools, but over the last several weeks, school libraries have seen a surge of opposition.
Last month, the governors of Texas and South Carolina urged state school officials to ban several books that contain “pornography” and “obscene” content. A school board member in Flagler County, Florida, filed a criminal report with local authorities after finding copies of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” —a young-adult memoir detailing the trials of being a Black queer boy — in her district’s school libraries. And in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County, school board members voted to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed from school library shelves, with two board members calling for the books to be incinerated.
Among the books that have been most frequently challenged in recent weeks include Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer.”
“I’ve worked at ALA for two decades now, and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” she said. “The impact will fall to those students who desperately want and need books that reflect their lives, that answer questions about their identity, about their experiences that they always desperately need and often feel that they can’t talk to adults about.”
Queer advocates who signed on to the statement echoed Caldwell-Stone’s concerns with regards for the LGBTQ community.
“Every LGBTQ young person needs to see themselves in stories about their lives, to let them know they belong just as they are,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy organization, said in a statement. “All leaders must speak up against hostile rhetoric and behavior targeting vulnerable young people and books about their lives, and prioritize protecting children and safe spaces for all to learn.”
Author Kelly Yang signed on to the statement after her children’s novel “Front Desk,” about a Chinese-immigrant experience, was challenged by school administrators in Plainedge, New York, and York County, Pennsylvania, in September.
She said she was pushing back because growing up, she never saw herself represented in books.
“I remember living through that and feeling so incredibly lonely,” Yang said. “We finally made this great progress and the fact that this can be so easily wiped out by these book bans, and to have all of these books be pulled and in some cases burned, it sort of feels like an existential crisis. It just feels like we could be erased at any moment, and that’s a dehumanizing feeling.”
Last week, world leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector gathered virtually for the Summit for Democracy to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle today’s greatest threats to democracy. In advance of the summit, the Council for Global Equality—a coalition of LGBTQI advocacy organizations of which the Center for American Progress is a proud member—in collaboration with F&M Global Barometers published report cards assessing the extent to which participating states have fulfilled their obligations to ensure LGBTQI+ people are full citizens and able to contribute to and benefit from democratic institutions. Unfortunately, the United States’ score on the human rights of LGBTQI+ people is in critical need of improvement. While we scored a 70 percent on basic human rights—a C- if our country were a school—we received failing grades in protecting LGBTQI+ Americans from violence and upholding the socioeconomic rights of LGBTQI+ Americans. We clearly need to catch up on our homework.
Why the terrible scores? A key reason is that LGBTQI+ Americans continue to lack comprehensive nondiscrimination protections at the federal level, leaving them vulnerable to discrimination in key areas of life such as taxpayer-funded programs like emergency shelters and in stores and restaurants. On top of that, this year marked the most anti-LGBTQI+ state legislative session in history, with transphobic attacks lodged at our most vulnerable community members: our children. From blocking access to necessary medical care, to prohibiting transgender kids from joining school sports teams, to erasing all mention of the existence of LGBTQI+ people from textbooks, more than 100 bills targeting transgender people were introduced in state legislatures last session. And school districts across the country are racing to pull LGBTQI+ -themed books and authors from library shelves. These attacks against the basic rights and dignity of LGBTQI+ people, and transgender people, in particular, have devastating consequences.
It should come as no surprise that, according to a 2020 survey by the Center for American Progress, over half of transgender people reported avoiding public spaces like stores and restaurants in order to avoid the trauma of discrimination. In addition to being the most anti-trans legislative session, 2021 is also the deadliest year on record for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, with over 50 reported killings of transgender or gender-nonconforming people, the majority of whom were Black and brown transgender women.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, over 80 percent of Americans support protections for LGBTQI+ Americans such as those found in the Equality Act, which passed the House in early 2021 yet still awaits a vote in the Senate. The bill’s provisions also have support from majorities in every state across the country, regardless of political ideology or faith tradition. Despite the protections’ broad popularity, support among elected officials lags behind that of the people they are supposed to represent. Congress’ failure to enact massively popular legislation advancing LGBTQI+ equality while state legislatures launched attacks on transgender children emphasizes how our country’s crisis in democracy impacts the basic rights of LGBTQI+ Americans. It also is reflected in our country’s dismal LGBTQI grades as compared to other countries participating in the Summit for Democracy this week. Unsurprisingly, research has shown a strong correlation between the strength of a country’s democratic institutions and the legal rights of its LGBTQI+ citizens. We are also coming to understand that the inverse is also true: The full and inclusive participation of LGBTQI+ citizens strengthens democratic institutions and the democratic process itself.
The Summit for Democracy is not the end but the launch of a year of action. LGBTQI+ Americans need the Senate to get to work and bring the country closer to realizing its founding ideals by passing the Equality Act. And to ensure our elected leaders better represent the American public, Congress should also pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would strengthen the integrity of our elections and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Let’s work together to hold our elected representatives accountable for strengthening our democracy for all Americans and bring home straight As next year.
Sharita Gruberg is the vice president of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress. Mark Bromley is the chair of the Council for Global Equality.
The South African government has taken important steps but did not provide adequate funding for shelters and other services for gender-based violence survivors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many survivors have been made more vulnerable in the context of Covid-19.
The South African government has acknowledgedhigh rates of gender-based violence both during and before the pandemic. But South African experts told Human Rights Watch that despite promises – including in a National Strategic Plan – to address gender-based violence and femicide, the government has still failed to provide necessary funding for shelters and other services. Efforts should be made to improve access for marginalized people, including sex workers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; and undocumented survivors.
“South Africa is facing a situation in which survivors have been locked down with abusers, and they need economic security to free themselves from their abusers, all during a very tight job market and a period of food insecurity,” said Wendy Isaack, LGBT researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Key services such as shelters have been under huge stress for months because of pandemic-related problems and costs and long-standing difficulties like late payment of funds in some places and patchy government support.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed staff at seven shelters spread across the country and six other frontline organizations working directly with victims to prevent gender-based violence or provide emergency support to survivors. Human Rights Watch also interviewed activists and other experts from 12 organizations working to end this violence. Human Rights Watch made unsuccessful attempts to interview or obtain feedback from South Africa’s Department of Social Development (DSD), which oversees shelter services.
Those interviewed said that the biggest problem was a lack of adequate government funding to help overwhelmed nongovernmental organizations providing direct support to victims, including shelters, cope with the pandemic.
The DSD should finalize its draft Intersectoral Shelter Policy as a matter of urgency, and all government agencies involved should carry out planned improvements.
Immediate-, medium- and long-term impacts from South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdowns have increased the risk for women and girls of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. Human Rights Watch research with frontline workers in South Africa suggests that this risk may be greater for additionally marginalized people like black lesbians, transgender men and women, sex workers, and older women, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants.
Those interviewed said that domestic violence victims living under lockdown were cut off from others who might help them, giving them no respite from partners or family members beating, raping, or psychologically or verbally abusing them.
Government support to shelters during the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to vary enormously among provinces. Some shelters described firm relationships and public health guidance and other support from the provincial DSD staff. Shelters in the Western Cape, for example, said that the agency provided guidance, solidarity, and personal protective equipment (PPE) and that funding for shelters arrived on time.
In other places, though, funding was late. The National Shelter Movement of South Africa, a nonprofit organization with about 78 shelters under its umbrella, said that some staff even had to take personal loans to pay expenses. The South African government did promote a hotline for victims it had set up in 2014, but civil society members said it sometimes provided confusing or out-of-date information and that it was hard for some victims to use because they were afraid their abuser would hear them.
Commentators have said that the South African government worked to keep services open for the survivors. But experts criticized the South African government, saying it was too late to acknowledge the impact of strict lockdowns and had not provided adequate public information about shelters and services to make clear that domestic violence victims could leave their homes to get help.
Frontline workers said that many people, perhaps especially among vulnerable populations, were further endangered by the sudden loss of jobs, incomes, or housing. Sex workers, in particular, were forced to leave brothels and to take greater risks to make ends meet as the work dried up, sex worker rights groups said. Research by Human Rights Watch in 2018 found that female sex workers are especially vulnerable to violence in South Africa, in part because their work is criminalized.
Frontline workers also said that loss of income and lack of food security made undocumented migrants even more dependent on abusive partners and less likely to leave them. Human Rights Watch researchfound that the government’s Covid-19 aid programs, including food parcels during national lockdown, overlooked people with disabilities, refugees and asylum seekers, and many LGBT people.
Shelters vary in whether they accept undocumented migrant survivors. South African law prohibits sheltering immigrants without documentation but allows for emergency humanitarian support for undocumented people. The exception is not clearly defined, and some shelters fear liability for violating the law. South Africa has one shelter designed for LGBT survivors, the Pride Shelter in Cape Town. Though other shelters accept them in theory, experts said that more funding, training, and skills building is needed to counter discrimination and bias in the shelter space, provide tailored services, and raise awareness about availability of shelter services among marginalized populations.
The pandemic and lockdowns temporarily affected or made impossible some important in-house services in shelters, such as some forms of counseling and job training, Human Rights Watch found. Job opportunities for clients evaporated. Shelters were unable to carry out normal in-person outreach activities to raise awareness about their services as well as fundraising activities to support themselves or supplement government grants.
Perhaps because of uncertainty and isolation, several shelter workers said they felt that anxiety and depression among clients increased. Staff also had to make significant changes to how they worked, they and experts said, for example, working week-long shifts rather than going home every day, and there were many reports of burnout among shelter staff.
Inconsistent government support for the shelters is not a new problem. The Heinrich Böll Foundationfor example, together with the National Shelter Movement, has long noted that shelters are “chronically underfunded,” and that funding is also highly variable between and within provinces. A 2019 report on the state of shelters by the Commission for Gender Equality, an independent government watchdog body, found “grossly inadequate and misaligned” funding for shelters from the agency and late payments in some provinces.
Ongoing sensitization and skills training for shelter staff to prevent discrimination against LGBT people, sex workers, or undocumented African non-nationals and to ensure tailored services are available is important, Human Rights Watch said. The DSD should also ensure that all shelters accept undocumented survivors and know how to assist them with immigration procedures.
“The government of South Africa has been addressing gender-based violence during the crisis over the past year,” Isaack said. “But a large-scale and fully resourced effort will be needed to ensure the Covid-19 crisis and its fallout over the next years doesn’t result in South Africa’s rates for gender-based violence worsening further.”
For more information about gender-based violence in South Africa and the impact on shelter services, please see below.
Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
South Africa’s president has characterized gender-based violence in South Africa as a “second pandemic,” after the coronavirus. Statistics, including police reports, are worrying but incomplete, both because of problems with data collection and because victims often do not report abuse. Despite the lack of accurate statistics, it is evident that the rates are high, both for women and for LGBT people.
It is also not yet clear to what extent gender-based violence increased during the Covid-19 lockdowns. An analysis by the Heinrich Böll Foundation released in August 2021 found that various data, including police reporting, a government helpline, and hospitals, did not provide a clear indication that rates had increased, but said that more research was needed. Several people interviewed said that they thought rates increased, and experts and frontline workers widely agreed that the pandemic created additional vulnerabilities.
In September 2021 parliament passed three linked bills amending relevant laws. One, the Domestic Violence Amendment Act, should make it easier for victims to get protection orders.
There is political will to address the crisis, but adequate funding has long been a problem, Human Rights Watch found. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide attributed the high rates of gender-based violence to South Africa’s history of violence and apartheid, but also to government underinvestment in solving the problem. Others have also concluded that budgetary constraints and lack of cooperation among government departments have undermined progress. Victims lack support when attempting to report violence and lack adequate access to courts and to shelters. The experts interviewed said that the pandemic worsened these problems.
The Commission on Gender Equality’s March 2020 submission to the United Nations committee that oversees states’ compliance with Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women detailed the situation just prior to the pandemic and lockdown. It said that while there was “political willingness to lead national efforts to deal with gender-based violence”, in practice, funding and implementation of a pre-Covid-19-era Emergency Response Action Plan was “still unfolding.” Despite promises of more support, the commission said that even before the pandemic, a lack of government funding had meant the shelters were forced to close, police were undertrained, and medical services for rape survivors were lacking.
The National Strategic Plan is the result of years of activism by South African civil society, including demonstrations in August 2018 that triggered a Presidential Summit Against Gender-Based Violence. Drafted by government and activists, the South African cabinet has also approved the plan. However, it is difficult to track how the plan is being funded. In February 2021 in response to government efforts, the private sector pledged a total of 128 million South African Rand (R, about US$8.1 million) to fight gender-based violence.
Government financial support to shelters and services for survivors is an important part of meeting human rights obligations to address gender-based violence. The National Plan’s Pillar 4, “Response, Care Support and Healing,” and Pillar 5, “Economic Empowerment” tasks the DSD with increasing funding for shelters and services at shelters, and to increase access to shelters and interim housing for all victims, including LGBT people, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, older women, and women with older children.
Covid-19 and Economic Insecurity
The abrupt change in economic activity caused by the pandemic and response had a profound impact on many South African’s economic security. Interviewees said that certain marginalized populations, in particular, African LGBT asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and sex workers, already more at risk of violence, experienced a significant drop in food security and loss of income. This compounded their risk, especially for those who were forced into homelessness.
Human Rights Watch analysis showed that the authorities did not take steps to facilitate support, including from donors, for refugees and asylum seekers whose access to food and other basic necessities were limited during the nationwide lockdown. As far as Human Rights Watch has been able to ascertain, the government did not consult with people from vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, leaving many at serious risk of Covid-19 infection, hunger, and other harm.
“Things were very bad to be honest – migrant sex workers were told to move out of brothels and safe houses,” a sex worker peer advocate said about her efforts to assist sex workers in a small town in Gauteng province. “We intervened and made agreements [with the owners] like [in one place] – as long as the sex workers were able to pay electricity the owner allowed them to stay. In another brothel [the owner] gave them a few days after we intervened, but eventually they had to go.”
Dudu Dlamini, a sex worker activist, said that “Sex workers had no cash, no income, they were chased out of houses by landlords”. She said that the loss of income often affected three or four dependents. “They couldn’t go home without bringing money, (couldn’t) visit their children.”
Sex work remains criminalized in South Africa, and as a result, the South African Police Service in some places perpetuates abuse by profiling and harassing sex workers. “Lockdown amplified the challenges for sex workers,” said Nosipho Vidima, a sex workers’ rights advocate. “You can imagine if you’re trying to work and there’s no one else in the street because of curfew… sex workers were harassed and arrested by police for being out, because they were known to be sex workers.”
A social worker at People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression, and Poverty (PASSOP), a community-based organization working to defend the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and non-nationals in Cape Town, said economic insecurity because of the pandemic made it even less likely that their clients, mostly undocumented immigrant LGBT survivors of gender-based violence, would leave abusive partners or report violence. “The majority [of our clients] have lost their jobs [and the need for food and shelter have been those most faced during Covid-19,” he said, adding that the group’s programming had been replaced by proving food parcels and other emergency relief.
“[Even under better times] our clients can’t get work and struggle because they don’t have documents and so have to rely on partners even if they are ill-treated,” he said. He said that at least nine clients were doing sex work to survive, and some had faced police harassment and others violence, and all were more likely to have unsafe sex.
“We did an announcement about our food parcels on the radio as well as our evacuation services and our line blew up,” the codirector from Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Newly homeless people needed] things like buckets to go get water and plastic bags to keep their things in. Especially during the hard lockdown, we had a lot of LGBTIQ people we needed to assist because their families had thrown them out of homes [and] we also did a lot of parcels for non-nationals because there was no assistance for undocumented people.”
Covid-19 Impacts on Gender-Based Violence Shelters
Human Rights Watch found that the pandemic had a significant impact on gender-based violence shelters. The shelters provide refuge from violence and include safe houses that offer temporary accommodation. Crises centers typically offer accommodation for three to six months, and most interviewed by Human Rights Watch also provide counseling, psychosocial and emotional assistance, and life planning, skills building and job training, as well as connections to courts or other government services such as help with protection orders or divorces.
Human Rights Watch did not receive any reports about major Covid-19 outbreaks in shelters, but protecting clients and staff from Covid-19 infection and managing lockdowns strained shelters in many ways. Several shelter workers said that stress and anxiety were greatly heightened for both clients and staff. “We probably worked harder than ever before,” said a senior social worker from a Durban shelter in KwaZulu-Natal. “We had greater levels of anxiety than before among the clients.”
One social worker said that a client and a worker, a cleaner at her shelter, had died of Covid-19, causing anxiety and distress among both staff and clients. “It was a roller coaster,” she said.
Clients at shelters had to self-isolate, especially new arrivals, meaning they lost out on solidarity and community, made worse by restrictions against visitors or making trips outside of the shelter. At one Gauteng shelter, for example, new clients had to self-isolate for 14 days. “It was a very traumatic time,” said a social worker at the shelter. “I’ve never spoken or debriefed about it, but it was frustrating and depressing and not just for the clients here but also for the staff.”
Two other senior shelter workers said that they and their staff had not had a chance to talk about the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing, and a few people said that the work and sacrifices of shelter staff had not been acknowledged, and that burnout was increasingly a problem. “Everyone just put their heads down and did the work, but now we’re seeing the impact on staff,” said a senior social worker at a 120-bed shelter, Saartjie Bartman Centre, in Cape Town. At least two shelters moved employees from daily shifts, going home at night, to working a week at a time to reduce exposure.
Protections against Covid-19 also created additional costs. “We spent huge amounts of money on PPE in the first months, some R60,000 [about $3,800],” said a senior social worker at the Saartjie Bartman Centre. Like others, this shelter also spent precious funds on private car services to reduce staff exposure on public transport. Fundraising events were canceled and at least some shelters decided to stop in-kind deliveries of food and other support that they usually depend on to reduce opportunities for virus transmission. In-person outreach work in communities also stopped, potentially reducing people’s access and knowledge about sheltering.
Covid-19 Impacts on Services for Survivors
Shelter workers said that perhaps the most worrying loss for shelter residents from the pandemic has been job opportunities. “Women can’t find jobs now, some have been with us for six months now and have no follow-up plan because of that,” a KwaZulu-Natal social worker at a shelter said in February. “I refuse to send a client back to an abusive situation.”
“Our clients have been disappointed,” said a senior social worker from the Sahara Shelter. “A lot come here unemployed, and we try to work as much as possible with local businesses and people who can give our clients jobs, so they have income, but that’s not been possible under Covid-19.” Another social worker said that “We have 15 women [clients] with us now, and only two are employed – it’s terrible.”
Government services were harder to get, including some lifesaving services. “Some government officials were working from home and it was hard to reach them”, a social worker from a shelter in the Eastern Cape Province said. “[This] led to a delay in service delivery to our clients and also added strain on them with regard to their cases. In the beginning of the lockdown, cases were postponed in court and protection orders could not be granted on the date set.”
“We faced huge problems in getting protection orders,” another social worker said.
Others said that health services were affected, with some hospitals shutting down or canceling normal services their clients depended on, some medications being harder to get, and general anxiety and uncertainty as to when taking a client to a hospital or clinic was worth the risk of exposure to Covid-19. “Access to mental [health services] and other health care has proved to be extremely inaccessible during lockdown, even more so than before,” a domestic violence worker in the Cape Flats said.
Shelters struggled to keep essential services such as psychosocial – mental health – support and counseling ongoing, and these essential services were halted in some places for at least a period. Some shelters lost at least some programming. “We also had to stop all our extra services,” said one social worker.
Organizations like SWEAT, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, and Mothers for the Future, a SWEAT offshoot, who work to support sex workers including protecting them against gender-based violence, struggled with major programming losses, especially in the early days of the pandemic. “We had to stop support group meetings,” Dlamini said. “We moved over to a WhatsApp group so we could provide a little support.”
“We even saw places that had provided condoms for free had shut down,” said a sex worker activist, Megan Lessing. “Some sex workers were earning R50 a day [about $3.20] and paying R20 [about $1.30] for condoms.”
Access to Shelters for Marginalized Survivors
Human Rights Watch found that shelters differed in whom they accepted as clients. Undocumented migrants, LGBT people, and women with older male children were sometimes excluded, for reasons that range from lack of private family facilities to concern about running afoul of the immigration law, or not being able to pay expenses the government would not reimburse for non-nationals. Older women, people who use drugs, and women with severe illnesses were sometimes excluded as well, with many facilities lacking the resources to provide specialized health or services, such as personal care and other support, to people with disabilities, including older people with disabilities.
While sex workers, transwomen, transmen, and lesbians, were usually accepted in theory, people working with these vulnerable groups said that particular group often did not feel welcome and that more needed to be done to help them access shelters.
“Vulnerable groups struggle to find or use shelters mainly because of stigma,” a shelter social worker said. “They are often discriminated against by the public and by staff at shelters … and they’re coming from a place where there’s a lack of acceptance to start with from family members.”
Citing security concerns, about half of the shelters contacted would not take older boys, usually any male over 12. Two shelters said that they did not take older women, in one case because of fears that they would never find another home for them. “We can’t [discharge] them because other support structures [like [older] people’s homes] are not working,” said one social worker. More commonly shelters said that they would not take women using drugs, because they are not set up to safely provide necessary services.
“Some shelters won’t take foreign nationals, especially undocumented people, [and] we spent a lot of time trying to place foreign nationals,” said one person who had helped more than 50 women leave domestic violence in Johannesburg. “We will assist, we won’t judge them if they’ve got papers and have been referred to us and have a right to be in the country,” one shelter social worker said. Others said that they would take undocumented survivors, but it was “problematic … we then have to refer them to the correct institutions handling their cases.”
The Creighton Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal said that they had recently taken in a transwoman. “It was very hard for her to find a shelter because in her ID she’s still a man,” the manager said. Other shelters said that staff can feel reluctant to accept transwomen in the facility, especially if there are no private rooms and bathrooms, or training for staff. Another shelter manager and National Shelter Movement executive committee member, Bernadine Bachar, said that the shelter serves transwomen, but that generally, “there’s a lot of reluctance to take transwomen. Staff feel that they’re not equipped to deal with issues.”
Sex workers experience barriers to accessing shelters, including assumptions about their drug use, on whether they can remain working and not violate shelter rules, or whether they have immigration documentation. One shelter worker said: “Sex workers are sometimes [dependent on] drugs; we have a zero-tolerance policy on that.” She also said that female sex workers often “disregard” the shelter’s 5 p.m. curfew, along with the government’s Covid-19 regulations.
“Sex workers … often do not stay long because they have to leave to do their work and so they violate the shelter rules as well as Covid lockdown regulation,” another person interviewed said.
“I put one sex worker in a shelter and the staff there saw her working and told us to take her to another shelter,” Dlamini said. “And there was another case where a sex worker tested positive for drugs and so was not allowed to stay.”
Sex workers usually do not even consider a shelter an option, a sex worker peer said. “The general feeling is that without a South African ID you can’t access anything.”
Government Support During the Pandemic
Unlike many other governments in the region, South Africa does provide support to shelters, and the pandemic has placed many strains on government institutions and services, Human Rights Watch said. It is apparently difficult to calculate government spending on gender-based violence, but experts agree that more funding and focus is needed.
Experts said that the government was too slow to publicly note that the pandemic and the stringent lockdowns had increased the risks of gender-based violence. They said that national and local officials have never acknowledged the added dangers to some groups like sex workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants as well as LGBT people. The experts also said that it was not made clear from the beginning that shelters and other services were essential services that would remain open and that survivors could leave their houses to get help even during curfew or the various levels of lockdown. “Women didn’t know what was going on,” Bachar said. “It was unconscionable.”
South African authorities’ enforcement of curfews and lockdowns has been strict, and sometimes violent, which may have affected victims’ ability to seek help. In June 2020 a report by the Atlantic Council noted that, “Since South Africa instituted a country-wide lockdown on March 27, the number of violent incidents by police against civilians has reportedly more than doubled, with poor and vulnerable populations most affected.”
For many shelters, work with local government officials and police continued during the pandemic even if it was bumpy. Some said they got some additional assistance like funds, PPE including masks and sanitizers, and advice from the government, although more commonly from the National Shelter Movement.
A social worker at the Sahara Shelter in Durban said: “we got masks and sanitizer … whenever there was stuff available (DSD) would drop it off and they helped with deep cleaning two or three times.”
“DSD worked with us from the beginning to prepare, even before lockdown, they sent an epidemiologist to consult with shelters,” a senior worker at a large shelter of 120 beds in Cape Town said. Other shelters said that they did not get any additional support from the government and instead were dependent on the National Shelter Movement for PPE and other resources as well as guidance on how to handle social distancing for example.
The biggest problem was when funding arrived late, those interviewed said. But the overall lack of funding for shelters, even when on time was also consistently mentioned as a problem. “A lack of funding means many shelter workers earn a minimum wage even though they are essential and the work they do is so important,” said Claudia Lopes from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Lopes and Kailash Bhana, who are doing research for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on the impact of Covid-19 on shelters, and Lisa Vetten, another expert, said that two shelters in the Eastern Cape had to halt their operations because they could not afford to pay for food as they had not received government funding during the pandemic. They said that at least one shelter in the Northwest province, struggled to feed about 80 clients, some of them children, and came close to collapse because of significantly delayed government funding.
Experts also expressed concerns about the quality of a government hotline set up during the pandemic for victims. “We were shocked by the GBV [gender-based violence] hotline,” the codirector at Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Victims are] trapped in their homes with their abuser and you’re giving them a telephone line. Many people have no phone, and [even if they do] the abuser is within earshot.”
Even when survivors could call, said Lopes, hotline workers were sometimes giving callers inappropriate advice and “deciding for themselves whether someone was eligible for shelters or not” rather than just doing referrals. In one example, she said, “the victim’s partner was a gangster, and she was needing urgent escape from the situation and the community that she lives in, but the command center told her that she was not eligible for sheltering as she could be accommodated elsewhere, essentially with her mom in the same community she had to leave for her own safety. They simply didn’t understand the dynamics.”
As Qatar prepares to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the government has assured prospective visitors it will welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) tourists and that fans will be free to fly the rainbow flag at the games. But for LGBT Qataris like Mohammed, openly expressing his sexuality as a gay man is not an option. Doing so, he fears, would land him backin jail.
Mohammed was arrested in 2014 for alleged same-sex conduct, punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment under article 285 of Qatar’s penal code. While in detention, officers searched his phone, identified a man he’d been messaging, and attempted to contact this person to target him as well. Mohammed was detained for weeks, enduring verbal abuse and sexual harassment by police. Officers even shaved his head.
Seven years later, Mohammed has resigned himself to a life of discretion: he dresses in a masculine style, refrains from posting about his sexuality online, and no longer meets men from dating apps.
“There is zero freedom [to post anything related to sexuality online],” Mohammed said.
As Qatar advances its surveillance capabilities, including inside football stadiums, the possibility of LGBT Qataris being persecuted for publicly supporting LGBT rights will remain long after the international fans have gone.
Physical and virtual spaces free from surveillance are vanishing in Qatar as data protection law allows broad exemptions that undermine the right to privacy. When digital surveillance is combined with laws that target individuals based on consensual sexual conduct outside of marriage, there is nowhere left to hide.
The Qatari government should repeal article 285 and all other laws that criminalize consensual sexual relations outside of marriage and leave people like Mohammed living in fear in the shadows. Freedom of expression and nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity should be guaranteed for all Qataris, not just spectators and tourists flocking to Qatar for the World Cup.
To commemorate the Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, the Biden administration issued a report on violence and discrimination against transgender people in the United States. The report outlines positive steps the administration is taking to address the root causes of violence – but progress will be limited unless lawmakers enact laws that support them.
Over the past two years, Human Rights Watch spoke with dozens of transgender survivors of violence, advocates, and service providers in the states of Florida, Ohio, and Texas about the forms anti-transgender violence takes. One of the key findings of that research was that socioeconomic marginalization, such as unemployment, housing insecurity, and a lack of reliable transportation keeps many transgender people in unsafe situations. The most marginalized, particularly Black transgender women, are especially at risk.
The Biden administration’s roadmap, created with input from transgender people and advocates, identifies key concerns and outlines steps the administration has been taking to advance transgender rights. Among these are support for inclusive employment opportunities, health services, housing and homeless shelters, and antiviolence services, which are all badly needed.
Recognizing these factors is laudable, but state and federal lawmakers also need to take concrete steps to address them if meaningful progress is to be achieved.
At a minimum, lawmakers should stop demonizing transgender people and attempting to restrict their rights, and instead enact laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. They should decriminalize sex work, making it easier for transgender sex workers to keep themselves safe and report violence when it occurs. They should explicitly cover gender-affirming care in state Medicaid policies and remove barriers to legal gender recognition to avoid instances in which people are publicly outed as transgender.
To improve support when violence occurs, lawmakers should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, enact the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act, and provide training and support to ensure shelters and anti-violence services are truly inclusive. And they should ban the “trans panic” defense, which allows perpetrators of anti-transgender violence to use their own fear or dislike of transgender people as a legal defense to minimize culpability in criminal proceedings when they have harmed or even killed a transgender person.
The Biden administration has identified some ways it can act to curb anti-transgender violence. To do that effectively, federal and state lawmakers will need to demonstrate the same commitment.
LGBT+ football fans “will be welcome” at next year’s World Cup in Qatar, England’s Football Association chief has insisted.
Qatar, chief executive Mark Bullingham said, has made “strong progress” in addressing a raft of human rights issues that have battered FIFA.
The 2022 World Cup will be the first one held in the Arab world and has been a hot-button issue since Qatar won the hosting rights in 2010.
Among them in the last decade of controversy and scandal: accusations of corruption, the cost, the emirate’s treatment of migrant workers, women and LGBT+ people.
Bullingham visited Qatar to better understand the issue, he said at a press conference Monday (22 November), and claimed to have “been given those assurances that people from the LGBT+ communities will be allowed to go to Qatar and support the [England] team”.
The 2022 World Cup, Bullingham hopes, will be a catalyst for change in Qatar.
“We have asked the question as to whether all of our fans will be able to come, particularly those from LGBTQ community,” he said, “and we received the unequivocal answer that absolutely everybody is welcome to come to Qatar.”
Football boss feels Qatar has made ‘strong progress’ ahead of World Cup
In June, UEFA organised a working group to examine Qatar’s human rights track record.
European football’s top governing body met with various bodies, including the International Labour Organisation, the National Human Rights Committee, the Qatar Football Association, before visiting the Ras Abu Aboud Stadium.
Bullingham was a member of the group, meeting with migrant workers and charities to capture what is happening on the ground.
“We believe the legislation the Qataris have brought in over the last few years has been strong progress from a fair low base,” he said.
The Ras Abu Aboud Stadium, the host venue for the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha. (Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
In Qatar, labour laws are based on the “kafala” system. Described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as exploitative and abusive, it sees employers sponsor foreign workers.
As unskilled workers often pay fees worth a year’s salary to labour recruiters in their homelands to score jobs in Qatar.
Many land in debt only to be hired in jobs that pay far less than advertised. They cannot simply leave the jobs, however, as their employers under the scheme must give them permission to do so.
At least 6,500 migrant workers have died since the World Cup was awarded in 2010 to Qatar, TheGuardianreported in February.
The tiny oil-rich Persian Gulf nation rejigged the labour system amid an international outcry and rolled out worker safeguards and a minimum wage.
Yet, as much as Qatar has taken some steps to change, Bullingham said that the pace remained slow.
“What is very clear, though,” he said, “is that the legislation isn’t being applied universally, and that has to be the next step, and that’s where we see the real progress will come through.”
Overall, Qatar has scrambled to rewrite its image with publicity-boosting sports events and even signing up footballer David Beckham to become the “face of Qatar” for the next decade.
Nevertheless, under Sharia law, gay Muslims in Qatar can face three years imprisonment or even the death penalty.
Although, activists say there are no known cases that the death penalty was enforced for homosexuality.
“What it doesn’t do is help the LGBTQ+ community,” Chris Paouros, a member of the English Football Association’s inclusion advisory board, said at the time.
“It’s great for us to be able to go and put our flags up in the stadium, and that’s wonderful during a World Cup. You want it to be the festival of football.
“But ultimately we do the work because we want to make sure that everybody can be free to be who they are and if you’re a Qatari and you’re not able to, then it just feels like window dressing.”
As of early November, this year is the deadliest on record for transgender people in the United States, with at least 45 people killed. But their deaths are only the tip of the iceberg. Many other transgender people are subjected to violence and harassment, in public and at home.
Our recent research focused on Florida, Ohio and Texas, three states where dozens of transgender people have been killed between 2016 and 2021. We found that anti-transgender violence is intersectional; risk is shaped by race, gender, class and other factors.
During this period, at least 88 percent of the transgender people killed in Florida, 91 percent in Ohio and 90 percent in Texas were people of color. The majority were Black transgender women, who are most at risk of fatal violence.
Some transgender people who experience violence are targeted or harassed by strangers in public, but others described harassment and abuse at the hands of family members, intimate partners or law enforcement officers — and what they needed most were resources and support.
In part, the high rates of violence that transgender people experience are fueled by public hostility, which some lawmakers have stoked this year. In 2021, a record number of anti-transgender bills were filed in state legislatures — and some passed into law — which demonized transgender people and sought to limit their access to health care, public facilities, and sports and recreation.
Other lawmakers have decried anti-transgender violence, typically by calling for more policing, stronger hate crimes laws, or harsher punishments. But if lawmakers want to address the problem, they need to address the conditions that give rise to it.
The transgender survivors and advocates I met with in Florida, Ohio and Texas described forms of violence that aren’t well addressed by hate crimes prosecution. Even when these prosecutions result in convictions, the state response lacks a survivor-centered, comprehensive approach and many survivors’ needs go unmet.
Addressing the violence requires paying attention to the socioeconomic marginalization and discrimination that put many transgender people in circumstances where they are exposed to harm. According to a survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 29 percent of transgender people live in poverty, compared with 12 percent of the U.S. population overall.
Without options, many transgender women engage in sex work and other informal economies, where criminalization puts them at heightened risk of violence by clients and law enforcement and can deter them from seeking assistance when violence occurs.
When people do face violence, the services designed to shield people from harm often fail transgender survivors. In many parts of the country, transgender people do not have access to homeless shelters, domestic violence services, or law enforcement agencies that will provide them meaningful help. Instead, many transgender people report being re-victimized when seeking out a lifeline, being turned away or mistreated because of their gender identity when they are most in need.
The same survey found that nearly a third of those who responded had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, and one in 10 had experienced homelessness in the previous year.
Many transgender people do not know of shelters that will house them consistent with their gender identity, and when they are able to secure a place, they often face harassment from staff or other residents. Without a safe place to stay or the resources to move, many transgender people are unable to escape situations where they experience violence.
Some people we interviewed said they often felt most at risk when others could perceive that they were transgender and openly disparaged or threatened them. When transgender people are unable to access hormones and other gender-affirming health care, or are unable to update their identification to align with their gender expression, it can increase their exposure to hostility in public.
Protecting people from brutal, often fatal violence should not be controversial. Nonetheless, few states have taken meaningful action to address the circumstances that put transgender people at particular risk. Only 21 states expressly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations, leaving people in many parts of the country without such basic protections.
More can be done. At the federal level, Congress could enact the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in a variety of domains. Lawmakers also should enact bills such as the Family Violence Prevention and Services Improvement Act, which would bolster services for survivors of intimate partner violence and family violence, including transgender survivors.
Condemning violence is not enough. If lawmakers are serious about stopping anti-transgender violence, they must address its roots.
Unless steps are taken to prevent violence from occurring — at a minimum, prohibiting discrimination, providing people with safe employment and housing options, and ensuring that anti-violence services are accessible and affirming — our interventions after the fact are going to be too little, too late.
Two years after 16 hockey players joined forces in Boston to become the first entirely transgender sports team in the United States, Team Trans — a growing group of novice to advanced players — reunited this past weekend at Capitol Ice Arena in Middleton, Wisconsin, to take on the Madison Gay Hockey Association in a weekend friendship series.
Following the success of its first friendship series against Boston Pride Hockey, an LGBTQ hockey team that was founded in 1989, Team Trans began to draw the interest of other trans and nonbinary hockey players from around the world. And while the Covid-19 pandemic foiled earlier plans for a reunion, players and organizers alike were keen to bring the event to the Madison area, where there is already an abundance of LGBTQ hockey players. In a spirited two-day tournament, Team Trans, which was split into three teams based on skill level, went undefeated in six games against the Madison team.
When the inaugural Team Trans first stepped off the ice and into the locker room two years ago, the players said they could tell that something was different. While many of them had played in LGBTQ leagues, they were often the only trans player on their team and struggled to find a community of trans athletes to talk to. But for one weekend, these players were all able to bond over a shared love for the sport and a mutual understanding of their personal struggles with gender identity.
“I keep meeting people that I’ve barely spoken to or haven’t spoken to directly, and I feel like I already know them in a way, just because of the shared experiences that we’ve had in hockey spaces,” Mason LeFebvre, a Team Trans goaltender and out trans man, told NBC News. “It’s just casual and comfortable from the start. We’re not going to ask each other a bunch of awkward questions that other people might ask if they know we’re trans. Then, we talk about other things that would be completely off the table for conversations with mostly cis[gender] people.”
Team Trans plays at Capitol Ice Arena in Middleton, Wis.Ian DeGraff of Ian Steven Photo
Avery Cordingley, who plays center and uses gender-neutral pronouns, shared a similar sentiment.
“It’s feeling like you don’t have to get over a bunch of awkward hurdles before you can just exist together in a space,” they said. “Last night, I picked up a player at the airport at 11 o’clock, and we’re instantly chatting. We both have the experience of, like, ‘Are we going to be able to keep playing hockey if we choose to transition?’ And we didn’t even have to go into that. We’re just like, ‘Yeah, I’ve played hockey here and here and here.’”
For LeFebvre and Cordingley, who both played girls’ hockey growing up before beginning their transition and now compete as teammates on Team Trans, there was always an inherent need to consistently prove themselves in a male-dominated sport.
“But there’s an extra layer to it when you’re also trans, especially if you know it at that age,” LeFebvre said. “It’s extra uncomfortable because you belong in the boys’ locker room, but they don’t see that.”
Cordingley said it’s even more uncomfortable if you “don’t have the language” to articulate what you’re going through.
“Because you don’t know why you’re hurt, you don’t know why it hurts that you’re not allowed in there,” they explained. “For me, it’s like you get off the ice, and your teammates go one way, and you’re just alone in a room by yourself the other way. It’s alienating, it’s othering, it makes you feel like you don’t belong there, even if you love the sport and just want to play.”
According to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank, 10 states have recently passed laws to ban transgender youth from participating in school sports that align with their gender identity, with proponents claiming that this legislation is designed to keep all athletes on a level playing field. Having weighed the consequences that transitioning would have on their own futures in hockey, LeFebvre and Cordingley both said that getting to know a trans or nonbinary athlete is the first step to understanding the harm that these policies have caused.
“We should look at them as a human being with the same wants and needs as their own kids and their own friends,” Cordingley said. “It doesn’t matter what your gender identity is. Everyone wants that team, everyone wants to feel like they belong, everyone wants to play the game that brings them joy. We’re not blowing the competition away; we’re very average. They should just understand that trans athletes are regular athletes, and trans athletes can be very good at their sports, but so can cisgender athletes.”
LeFebvre said proponents of trans sports bans “just need to watch trans athletes complete and realize they are just athletes who happen to be trans.”
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with being trans — it has to do with dedication. Some of it is natural talent, but a lot of it is hard work and dedication, just like it is for anyone else,” he said.
Last month, the Premier Hockey Federation, formerly known as the National Women’s Hockey League, released a new inclusion policythat was developed in consultation with Athlete Ally, a nonprofit LGBTQ athletic advocacy group, and Chris Mosier, a transgender triathlete. The policy itself provides a pathway for the participation of both trans and nonbinary athletes in the federation.
While they both think that the federation has taken a step in the right direction, LeFebvre and Cordingley agreed that, until it is put into practice and updated with less ambiguous language, it will be hard to gauge the policy’s effectiveness.
“You could get a hormone exemption, so that someone like me or Avery theoretically could play in the league, but what does the exemption require?” LeFebvre said. “Maybe it’s completely reasonable stuff, maybe it’s not. We don’t know, because it’s not specific, and it might just be partially because you can’t be super specific on an individual basis. But also, if they just use the vagueness of it to not write any exemptions ever, then that’s not great, obviously.”
But for now, LeFebvre and Cordingley have turned their attention to the future of Team Trans, which has attracted hockey players from all over the United States, Canada and Japan. As a team, they hope to host a friendship series every year and travel to some LGBTQ tournaments, showing transgender athletes of all ages — but especially younger generations — that their dreams are not only valid but possible.
“We’re not going anywhere, and we just love the game like everyone else,” Cordingley said. “We all have a place in the game, and the game is stronger” because of our differences.
Transgender people are at significant risk of violence and harassment in the United States, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 65-page report, “‘I Just Try to Make It Home Safe’: Violence and the Human Rights of Transgender People in the United States,” documents how persistent marginalization puts transgender people, particularly Black transgender women, at heightened risk of violence at the hands of strangers, partners, family members, and law enforcement. “Every year, advocates document dozens of cases of fatal violence against transgender people,” said Ryan Thoreson, an LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And these killings are symptomatic of a wider pattern of physical and sexual assaults, verbal harassment, and intimidation of transgender people that demands urgent attention.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 60 transgender people, service providers, and advocates, in addition to reviewing available data on anti-transgender discrimination and violence in the United States. Interviews were conducted primarily in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, where dozens of cases of fatal violence against transgender people have been documented in recent years.
While the administration of President Joe Biden has taken steps to address anti-transgender discrimination, transgender people continue to face widespread hostility in many parts of the United States. In 2021, lawmakers introduced a record number of anti-transgender bills in state legislatures, seeking to restrict transgender people’s access to health care, bathrooms, and sports and recreation. People interviewed said that such actions make them worry even more about their safety in public spaces.
Only 21 states expressly prohibit gender identity discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations under state law, leaving transgender people in many parts of the country particularly vulnerable to mistreatment.
Because of family rejection and discrimination in education and employment, many transgender people have limited employment options and work in informal economies like sex work. When this work is criminalized, sex workers are at particular risk of being assaulted or killed by clients and report being reluctant to seek assistance from law enforcement for fear of being harassed or prosecuted.
Data suggests that transgender people face high rates of poverty, and housing insecurity, limiting their ability to leave situations where they are exposed to violence. The barriers that transgender people face in obtaining gender-affirming health care and identification documents can also heighten their risk of violence by increasing the likelihood that others perceive them as transgender and target them for harassment in public spaces, Human Rights Watch found.
While some interviewees described physical and sexual assaults by strangers in public settings, others described violence at the hands of intimate partners, family members, or law enforcement personnel.
When transgender people did experience violence, whether in public or private, many felt they did not have access to services designed to protect people from harm. Discrimination by homeless shelter staff and residents, domestic violence service providers, and law enforcement personnel left some without alternative options or basic resources to keep themselves safe.
Under international human rights law, governments have an obligation to respond to foreseeable threats to life and bodily integrity, and to address patterns of violence targeting marginalized groups. Lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels should work to address socioeconomic conditions that put transgender people at risk of violence and provide funding and support to ensure that all survivors of violence are able to access the resources they need.
“Simply condemning violence after it happens is too little, too late,” Thoreson said. “If lawmakers are serious about stopping anti-transgender violence, they need to address the poverty and discrimination that put so many transgender people in harm’s way.”
Recent calls to ban books on race and LGBTQ issues in school libraries by elected officials are a dangerous new low amid the continued weaponization of issues like transgender athletes in school sports and the restriction of lessons on safer sex practices.
But these moves by school board members like Rabih Abuismail and Kirk Twigg in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County — and Republican governors like Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Greg Abbott of Texas — go beyond previous political fearmongering tactics around identity. Given that studies by the Trevor Project show that LGBTQ teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, they are playing politics with young people’s lives.
Access to stories about people like us, and by us, are critical for marginalized communities, especially the youngest, most vulnerable members. As a person who was called almost every homophobic slur imaginable between the ages of 11 and 14, I speak from experience. And it was a piece of queer literature that got me through the worst of it.
In the seventh grade, a friend of my parents gave me three boxes of books that belonged to her gay son, who had recently died of AIDS. Before she closed the last box, she looked at one of the books and hesitated.
“I think you might like this one,” she said, placing it inside. She looked at me with what I now know was an expression of recognition.
When I got home, that was the first book I pulled from the box: Patricia Nell Warren’s “The Front Runner.” The text on the back gave me a chill.
“Billy Sive is young, proud and gay — and he doesn’t care who knows it.”
The words felt almost like an accusation. Even growing up in the Bay Area with LGBTQ-friendly parents, the message had been drilled into me at school that queerness was inherently bad. Eventually, my curiosity won out and I began to read it.
The 1974 novel tells the story of a college track coach, Harlan Brown, and his star athlete, Billy. As the pair fall in love, Harlan comes to terms with his internalized homophobia. As I read the book, I started to deal with my own.
The story also includes lesbian and trans characters and a scene depicting the Stonewall Riots — the first time I learned about the pivotal 1969 event that ignited the LGBTQ rights movement in New York. Warren, a lesbian, made history with the novel when it became the first book of contemporary gay fiction to reach the New York Times Best Seller list. In spite of its then-common tragic ending, it contained a lot of hope. (The international LGBTQ running club that started in San Francisco took its name from the book.)
My freshman year of high school, I discovered a new world of queer literature in the school library. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also the year I officially came out. But even after devouring books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jan Morris, Carson McCullers and other LGBTQ authors, I never forgot “The Front Runner.” You never forget the life vest someone throws you when you’re drowning.
Perhaps the most disturbing statements made by Virginia school board members Twigg and Abuismail in advocating a ban on “sexually explicit” literature like Adam Rapp’s queer-themed “33 Snowfish” was that they’d like to burn such books. I don’t think I need to remind you what fascist political party hosted book bonfires in 1930s Berlin.
But don’t think it’s just the books they want to destroy: It’s also the ideas and the people they represent.
Perhaps if these officials had ever read a book, they’d know what history has to say about people who plunder libraries for kindling.
