No, the University of Reading Didn’t “Cancel” the Ancient Greeks

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper that is notorious for promoting wildly sensationalistic headlines, having little-to-no fact-checking, and frequently outright fabricating news stories for the sake of attention. Their unreliability is so notorious that, in 2016, they were sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) for not meeting standards of journalistic integrity and, in February 2017, Wikipedia took the unprecedented step of blanket-prohibiting the use of the Daily Mail as a source in their encyclopedia articles, with editors concluding via consensus that the tabloid is “generally unreliable.”

On 1 January 2022, the Daily Mail published an article written by an author named Chris Hastings with the shocking headline “Reading University bosses cancel the Ancient Greeks by removing part of a poem that mentions domestic violence to avoid upsetting students.” The article claims that unnamed “bosses” at the University of Reading (by which they presumably mean an instructor in the classics department) “cut several lines” from a handout bearing the text of the poem “Types of Women,” otherwise known as “Semonides Fragment 7,” composed by the ancient Greek poet Semonides of Amorgos, who lived in around the seventh century BCE. The article claims that the university did this because they feared that the lines might offend students, even though no students had actually complained about the poem.

This article has been widely and uncritically shared on social media, including among classicists. On top of this, the story originating with the Daily Mail has been picked up by over a dozen other media outlets, including The Sun, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. Even the website Ancient Origins, which regularly publishes wooish nonsense about ancient history, has published a piece on the subject. Information from an inside source, though, hints that the story may be totally fabricated—a prospect which seems especially likely given the Daily Mail‘s well-documented history of fabricating stories. Even if the story is not totally fabricated, it is at the very least heavily misrepresented and blown out of proportion in a manner that is clearly deliberately designed to provoke outrage.

The poem in question

This whole story centers around “Types of Women” or “Semonides Fragment 7,” a rather notorious 118-line poem in the Ancient Greek language in iambic trimeter that was composed in the seventh century BCE by the lyric poet Semonides of Amorgos. To put it bluntly, the poem is a vicious misogynistic screed. It is primarily of interest as a historical artifact because of what it tells us about ancient Greek misogyny, and it is generally considered to hold little value in terms of literary merit.

Semonides was a fairly obscure poet in antiquity. He was never seen as one of the literary greats, and his poem “Types of Women” seems to have been seldom read. The poem has only survived at all because, in the fifth century CE, a Greek anthologist named Ioannes Stobaios compiled a massive anthology of extracts from various ancient writers, and he just so happened to include the poem “Types of Women.” Stobaios’s Anthology 4.22.193 is the only place where the poem is preserved.

In the poem, the speaker treats women not as people, but rather as commodities for men to own. He divides women into ten different “types,” and he claims that Zeus created all these types from different animals or elements. The first nine types of women described in the poem are: the sow, the vixen, the bitch, the earth, the sea, the donkey, the weasel, the mare, and the monkey. The speaker views all these types of women from the perspective of their respective husbands. He portrays all of them as thoroughly awful in their own unique ways, with no redeeming qualities.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a terracotta statuette of a pig, the animal after which the first “type” of woman in Semonides’s poem is named, from the region of Boiotia in central Greece, dating to the fifth century BCE, now on display in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore

There is a very brief, approving mention of domestic violence in Semonides’s description of the type of woman that Zeus supposedly made from the bitch. This mention only lasts for a line or two, depending on the translation that is used. The speaker claims that the kind of woman made from the bitch is obnoxiously and insatiably curious and that a man can’t get her to stop poking her nose everywhere, not even if he threatens her with violence or bashes out her teeth with a rock. He says, as translated by M. L. West in his book Greek Lyric Poetry, on page 17:

“One from the bitch: a slut, that by herself
gets pregnant; wants to hear and wants to know
every damned thing, peers everywhere and prowls
and yelps although there’s no one to be seen.
The man can’t make her stop, neither with threats
nor if he knocks her teeth out with a stone
in rage, nor if he speaks with gentle words,
not even if she’s sitting among guests,
but all the time he has this hopeless blight.”

The speaker goes through all the different “types” of women, complaining about what he thinks is wrong with each one. Finally, near the end, the speaker describes the last type of woman: the kind Zeus made from the bee. This is the only type of woman that he portrays favorably in any way. He further portrays this kind of woman as an extraordinarily rare and precious commodity that only an extraordinarily lucky man will ever possess. Here is the description of the bee woman from the same translation by M. L. West that I’ve just quoted, on pages 18–19:

“One from the bee: he’s lucky who gets her,
for she’s the only one on whom no blame
alights. Wealth grows and prospers at her hands.
Bound in affection with her husband she
grows old, her children handsome and esteemed.
Among all women she stands out; a charm
divine surrounds her. She does not enjoy
sitting with women when they talk of sex.
Of all the wives that Zeus bestows on men,
this kind’s the finest and most sensible.
But all the other breeds, by Zeus’s design,
exist and ever will abide with men.”

Notice how, even when he’s offering very limited praise to this one specific type of woman that he regards as extremely rare, the speaker in Semonides’s poem still does not regard her as a person with thoughts, feelings, or ambitions of her own, but rather purely as a commodity—a precious thing for a man to own.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a pair of ancient Greek gold plaques dating to the seventh century BCE, depicting a female figure in the form of a bee, found at Kameiros on the island of Rhodes, now held in the British Museum

The poem concludes with a bitter denunciation of all women, which claims that women are the worst plague Zeus has ever made to punish men, that women are the sole cause of all suffering in the world, and that any woman who seems like a good wife is secretly the “most rotten” kind of adulteress. This denunciation heavily implies that the ideal bee woman that the speaker has just finished describing doesn’t really exist at all. The passage reads as follows, in West’s translation, on page 19:

“Yes, the worst pestilence Zeus ever made
is women. Even if they look to be a
helpmeet, yet the master suffers most:
the man who keeps a woman in his house
never gets through a whole day in good cheer,
nor will he soon drive Hunger from his door,
that hostile lodger, hateful deity.
When with his household he seems most content,
whether by God’s grace or on man’s account,
she finds some fault, and girds herself for war.
Where there’s a woman, they may not be keen
even to welcome in a visitor.
I’ll tell you, she that looks the best-behaved
in fact is the most rotten of them all,
for while her man gawps fondly at her, oh,
the neighbours’ merriment: another dupe!
Yes, when the talk’s of wives, each man will praise
his own and criticize the other bloke’s,
but we don’t realize it’s equal shares.
For Zeus made wives as his worst pestilence
and fettered us in bonds unbreakable.”

This poem is well known among classicists and ancient historians as an example of ancient Greek misogyny, and it is commonly assigned in introductory courses about ancient Greek culture. I was personally assigned to read M. L. West’s translation of the poem for the course CLAS-C 101 (“Ancient Greek Culture”), which I took the spring semester of my freshman year at Indiana University Bloomington. I’ve quoted the poem many times on this blog as an example of ancient Greek misogyny, including, most recently, in this article I posted in December 2021.

Despite the poem being well known, though, scholars have published relatively little work on it, largely because it is seen as an essentially one-dimensional poem, devoid of any real depth or literary merit that might make it worth analyzing.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure vase painting dating to the fifth century BCE depicting a young bride being prepared for her wedding

Is the Daily Mail story completely fabricated?

The Daily Mail claims that students in a seminar at the University of Reading were given a censored version of Semonides’s poem that deliberately omitted the line or two that approvingly describe a husband bashing out his wife’s teeth with a rock. But is this story even true? I certainly wouldn’t put it past the Daily Mail to completely fabricate a story like this for attention, since they have a history of fabricating stories.

Last year, I caught the website Greek Reporter, another news outlet with dubious journalistic integrity, posting a clearly deliberately fabricated story claiming that archaeologists have found the remains of the Trojan Horse. I document Greek Reporter‘s fabrication in this article I posted on 11 August 2021 and this follow-up article I posted a couple of days later.

Part of how I was able to prove that the Greek Reporter article from last year is a fabrication is because the article made the mistake of using the name of a real archaeologist, Dr. Christine Morris. I was easily able to contact Dr. Morris via email to confirm that she had, in fact, never done or said any of the things that were attributed to her in the article. The Daily Mail article is a bit trickier, because it does not cite any named sources for its claim that the University of Reading censored the line or two about domestic violence from Semonides’s poem.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Mykonos vase, which may be the earliest surviving visual depiction of the Trojan horse, dating to sometime between c. 700 and c. 650 BCE

Fortunately, I have been able to acquire some inside information about what is really going on in the University of Reading classics department from Dr. James Lloyd-Jones, who is an associate lecturer in that department. According to his faculty webpage, his main research interests include ancient music and Sparta. Lloyd-Jones has written a detailed thread on Twitter in response to the Daily Mail article, in which he explains what is really going on to the best of his knowledge.

Lloyd-Jones notes that the poem in question is taught as part of the introductory module CL1GH in a seminar titled “Women in Archaic Greek Society,” which he says is dedicated to discussion of Semonides’s “Types of Women” and the myth of Pandora as recounted in Hesiodos’s Works and Days, lines 59–82.

Lloyd-Jones says that he has personally taught this seminar in the past, but he did not teach it this year. He says that the department gives considerable latitude to individual instructors to decide how they want to teach the seminar. He says that, every time he has taught the seminar, he has given the students the whole poem, unabridged, on a printed handout.

He further explains that the source for the Daily Mail article was a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that was sent to every faculty member in the entire school of the humanities at the University of Reading one week before the end of the last term. He shares a screenshot of the full request as he received it. Most of the questions in the request are about trigger warnings, but it also includes the following question:

“Since 1 August 2020 have any of the degree courses felt the need to rest or drop any materials from any of their modules and or reading lists following concerns expressed by students. If the answer is yes, can you identify what has been dropped and or rested and why.”

Whoever wrote this FOI request clearly deliberately designed it to bait faculty into giving information that the Daily Mail could then use to spin a narrative about “woke” universities supposedly “cancelling” classic literature. In other words, the tabloid already knew exactly the story they wanted to tell before they even sent the FOI request; they clearly only sent the request in order to find details that they could use to support the pre-existing narrative that they already wanted to tell.

What’s even more interesting to me is that Lloyd-Jones shares a screenshot of his own response to the FOI request in his thread. His response happens to mention Semonides’s poem in a section titled “General Warnings,” which reads as follows:

“There will often be a general verbal statement at the beginning of lectures or modules that will regularly engage with sources that might be triggering (especially so if this involves sources that discuss domestic violence). An example of a text that might result in me giving such a warning is Semonides fr.7, a poem that depicts abusive violence against women in a domestic setting.”

Lloyd-Jones speaks as though he had never heard anything about anyone censoring any lines from the poem until the Daily Mail article came out a few days ago. Furthermore, his own response to the FOI request contains all the information that a writer for the Daily Mail would need to fabricate a made-up story claiming that the University of Reading was censoring the poem.

I have no information about anyone else, other than Lloyd-Jones, mentioning Semonides’s “Types of Women” in their response to the FOI request. This leads me to suspect that the story may be simply a complete fabrication based on information that the Daily Mail was able to pull from Lloyd-Jones’s own response to their FOI request.

An extremely minor incident (if it really happened at all)

Even if we charitably assume that the Daily Mail didn’t just completely fabricate this whole story out of whole cloth, it is abundantly clear that they have blown an extremely minor incident wildly out of proportion. The absolute worst-case scenario here is that an individual seminar instructor in the University of Reading classics department might have cut one or two lines that approvingly describe a man violently bashing out his wife’s teeth with a rock from a handout given to students bearing the text of a 118-line misogynistic poem that’s all about how all women are supposedly the worst plague Zeus has ever created to punish men and the sole cause of all suffering in the world.

Furthermore, even if the line or two that approvingly describe a man bashing his wife’s teeth out with a rock were indeed omitted from the handout given to students in the seminar this year as the Daily Mail article seems to suggest, students at the University of Reading certainly still have access to the full text of the poem—regardless of what was presented to them on the handout.

Dr. James Lloyd-Jones points out in his thread on Twitter that all students at the University of Reading have free access to the full, unabridged text of the poem “Types of Women” in both the original Ancient Greek and English translation through the Loeb Classical Library (LCL), which is available both in print through the university library and online through the Loeb Classical Library website. The Daily Mail article even seems to admit this in the very last line, with the sentence:

“It is understood the entire text of Types Of Women is available to students either online or in hard copy.”

Lloyd-Jones also notes that, in another introductory module at the same university, CL1SO, students are required to purchase M. L. West’s book Greek Lyric Poetry, which contains the complete poem in English translation.

Clearly, at the very least, the university is not preventing any students who want to read the full text of the poem from reading it.

ABOVE: Photograph I took of the complete set of the Loeb Classical Library in the Reference Room of Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington (left) and image of the front cover of the book Greek Lyric Poetry by M. L. West (right)

How the Daily Mail article blows the whole story wildly out of proportion

The Daily Mail, however, wildly inflates this whole story about one instructor maybe cutting a line or two from a handout bearing the text of a 118-line poem into a massive story about the University of Reading “cancelling the ancient Greeks.” The article makes sure to associate Semonides’s poem with the big names of Greek literature by mentioning that it is taught in a module alongside “works by Homer and Aristotle.” This is clearly meant to give readers the impression that Semonides was a literary genius of comparable merit to Homer, even though he has, in fact, been more-or-less obscure for most history and he is generally regarded today as a mediocre poet at best.

The article also makes sure to quote a couple of retired professors, who express outrage that anyone affiliated with any university would censor any ancient poem in any context for any reason. First, the article quotes Dr. Jeremy Black, a retired professor of history whose academic specialty is in eighteenth-century British foreign policy:

“Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, said: ‘This is beyond naive. It is positively ridiculous and has no place in academia. If we applied this same kind of censorship to the news we would end up with a most limited and ignorant view of the world.’”

Later, the article quotes Ewen Bowie, a retired classicist, saying:

“But Ewen Bowie, an emeritus fellow at Corpus Christi College and Prof Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University, said ancient works needed to be ‘understood in context’. He added: ‘When you start censoring reading lists you are putting your foot on the slippery slope down towards censoring what is being sold in bookshops.’”

I have no idea whether Jeremy Black and Ewen Bowie really said these things specifically in response to the supposed censoring of one or two lines of “Types of Women” from a handout. The Daily Mail may very well have fabricated these quotes or clipped them out of context. If they really said these things specifically in response to the story described in the article, then I think they were overreacting. In any case, it is clear that the Daily Mail includes these quotes deliberately in order to encourage their readers to share the professors’ outrage.

In order to make Semonides of Amorgos seem like a major figure of ancient Greek literature, the article even includes a photo of a Greek statue that it explicitly claims represents him. This claim is demonstrably false. In reality, there are no surviving ancient depictions of Semonides. He has always been a fairly obscure poet, and we have no evidence to suggest that anyone has ever made a statue of him, whether in antiquity or in the present day.

The statue that is used in the Daily Mail article is one that is currently held in the Department of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Antiquities at the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is a Roman statue dating to the second century CE, based on a Greek statue of the fifth century BCE attributed to the sculptor Pythagoras of Rhegion. It depicts an unknown lyre player. There is currently no evidence to suggest that it is specifically a statue of Semonides.

One would think that the Daily Mail would know this, since they clearly got the photo of the statue from a page on Wikimedia Commons that explicitly describes the statue as depicting a “lyre player” and mentions nothing about Semonides.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman statue of an unknown lyre player dating to the second century CE, based on an earlier Greek statue of the fifth century BCE. The Daily Mail apparently thinks this statue is of Semonides.

The false impression that the statue in question represents Semonides presumably comes from the fact that it is the first image that comes up if you search for the name “Semonides of Amorgos” in Google, because the photo happens to be featured on the Wikidata page about Semonides of Amorgos. Wikidata is less widely used than other Wikimedia projects (like Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or Wikimedia Commons) and consequently has a lower standard of accuracy, especially when it comes to the use of images. Even the Wikidata page, though, simply uses the photo with a link back to the page on Wikimedia Commons, without actually claiming explicitly that it is a photo of a statue of Semonides.

It therefore seems that the Daily Mail, desperate to find a photo of some antique-looking statue to represent Semonides in order to make him seem more like an esteemed ancient poet, simply used the first image that came up in Google when they searched for his name, ignoring the fact that the page where they found the image describes it as a statue of a “lyre player,” not a statue of Semonides.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing that the statue of the unknown lyre player from the Louvre Museum is currently the first image that comes up in Google if you search for the name “Semonides of Amorgos”

Why the Daily Mail‘s sensationalist reporting is harmful to the humanities

The Daily Mail‘s sensationalist article, which is so clearly designed to provoke outrage, is not just misleading; it actually causes harm, in several different ways. The first way in which the article causes harm is that it encourages people to see a university education in general and a humanities education in particular as less valuable—or, indeed, even laughable. If you look at the comments section underneath the article, you can see that it is full of people denouncing universities in general and the humanities in particular. One comment reads:

“These are no longer universities in any stretch of the imagination. they [sic] are kindergartens for the weak minded. Why bother spending good money to go there to get you [sic] bottie powdered?”

Another comment reads:

“If I was an employer then I would be throwing all the CVs from the Woke universities straight in the bin!”

When the public is fed a steady diet of cynical, attention-seeking stories from sensationalist news outlets that are deliberately designed to falsely portray university students in general and humanities students in particular as “weak minded” babies who just can’t handle reality, it is not surprising that some people will use this portrayal to argue that there is no value in studying the humanities. This only contributes to the worsening crisis of humanities departments being downsized, defunded, and even outright dissolved—a crisis I have written about on several previous occasions, but perhaps most notably in this article from February 2021.

ABOVE: Screenshot of some of the comments underneath the Daily Mail article denouncing university students as “weak minded” babies who supposedly can’t handle the real world

How the article promotes a bunker mentality conducive to conspiracy theories

In addition to directly harming the reputation of the humanities, the Daily Mail‘s piece about the University of Reading supposedly “cancelling the ancient Greeks” is also clearly written to further reinforce the common fear among conservatives that powerful people with sinister agendas are deliberately attacking the foundations of so-called “western civilization.” This fear that “western civilization” is under attack encourages a kind of paranoid bunker mentality that is conducive to conspiracy theories.

One of the other comments underneath the article (which is shown in the screenshot above) claims that British universities are being subjected to deliberate “subversion”:

“What country allows its institutions to be subject of obvious subversion without its Government doing something about it? Zahawi [i.e., Nadhim Zahawi, the incumbent British Conservative Secretary of State for Education] needs to get a grip in education.”

The person who wrote this comment is probably not a Neo-Nazi, since they don’t seem to have an explicit problem with the fact that Nadhim Zahawi is of Iraqi ancestry. Nonetheless, the commenter’s apparent belief that malicious, powerful people are deliberately “subverting” traditional values and institutions in order to harm the nation from within is only a few short steps away from the antisemitic conspiracy theory that is the very core of Neo-Nazism—especially when paired with the implication that a strong, male leader needs to step in, impose his authority, and crush the supposed subverters.

ABOVE: Nazi propaganda poster for the 1932 Reichstag election, showing a heroic Nazi worker with blond hair, masculine features, and rippling muscles towering like a giant over tiny, weak-looking, Jewish-coded men in suits

The Daily Mail‘s long record of transphobia

The third way the Daily Mail article causes harm is because of how the story is presented and directly paired with transphobia. You see, the Daily Mail is a British media outlet and, as I discuss in this article from November 2021, the British media in general is relentlessly obsessed with demonizing transgender people at any and every possible opportunity. Even news outlets like The Guardian that are otherwise left-leaning regularly publish articles attacking trans people.

The Daily Mail is generally right-wing in its politics and it is one of the most relentlessly transphobic outlets of them all. In a particularly notorious incident, back in 2012, a primary school teacher named Lucy Meadows came out as a transgender woman. The local newspaper wrote an article about her, and the U.K. national press swiftly came down on her like a swarm of locusts, relentlessly harassing her and publishing vicious attack articles against her for being transgender.

The Guardian reports that Meadows was constantly swarmed by the press, so that she had to sneak out of her own home via the backdoor and she had to arrive at the school where she worked either very early or very late in order to avoid the crowd of reporters. The press offered money to parents if they could snap photos of her without her consent. They eventually snagged an old photo of her from her siblings’ personal Facebook pages and used it without permission.

The Daily Mail published a particularly vicious op-ed written by the right-wing columnist Richard Littlejohn on 20 December 2012 titled “He’s not only in the wrong body … he’s in the wrong job.” In the op-ed, Littlejohn insistently misgendered Meadows and demanded that she be fired from her job as a primary school teacher, claiming that her gender transition would have a “devastating effect” on her students.

On 3 January 2013, Meadows sent a complaint about the harassment she was facing to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). She specifically mentioned Littlejohn’s op-ed for the Daily Mail in her complaint. Meadows ultimately killed herself in March 2013. The coroner at the inquest into her death specifically singled out the Daily Mail as especially culpable in driving her to commit suicide.

In more recent years, the Daily Mail has published articles promoting transphobia and attacking trans people with even greater frequency. Transphobia has become an integral part of their brand.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article on the website DeSmog showing Richard Littlejohn, the columnist for the Daily Mail whose op-ed attacking Lucy Meadows, a transgender primary school teacher, most likely contributed to her killing herself in March 2013

How the Daily Mail article about Semonides is paired with transphobia

Naturally, with this long record of transphobia to uphold, the Daily Mail couldn’t just write an article about a topic like ancient Greek literature without turning it into a story about how trans people are bad and ruining everything.

Thus, if you scroll down to the bottom of the article “Reading University bosses cancel the Ancient Greeks by removing part of a poem that mentions domestic violence to avoid upsetting students” by Chris Hastings (which is the article I have been talking about so far in this post), you will find that it is directly paired with another, shorter article with no pictures titled “…and school asks parents to buy book on ‘agender dominatrix’ for its library,” written by Sanchez Manning.

This secondary article, which is directly attached to the first one and is only accessible via the same URL, describes how an unnamed secondary school located somewhere in Dorset apparently sent out a list of books that they would like to include in their school library so that parents could choose some books off the list to buy them for the school library as an act of Christmas charity.

The article describes one father’s shock and horror when he saw that one of the many diverse titles on the list happens to be a book titled Gender Euphoria: Stories of Joy from Trans, Non-binary and Intersex Writers, which is an anthology of short stories edited by Laura Kate Dale that includes stories written by nineteen different trans, nonbinary, and intersex authors.

The article introduces the anthology by focusing on one particular story that happens to be included in it that is apparently about an “agender dominatrix” who enjoys being called “Daddy.” The first sentence of the article reads as follows:

“A father has described his shock at receiving a ‘Christmas’ request to buy a transgender book telling the story of an ‘agender dominatrix’ called ‘Daddy’ for his daughter’s school library.”

This sentence misleadingly makes it sound like the school specifically requested the father to buy the story about the agender dominatrix, even though this story is just one of the at least nineteen different stories included in the much larger anthology, which the Daily Mail article itself later admits is just one of many books that were apparently included on the list that the school sent out for parents to choose from to buy for the school to include in its presumably much larger library.

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of the short story anthology book Gender Euphoria: Stories of Joy from Trans, Non-binary, and Intersex Writers, edited by Laura Kate Dale

It’s also worth emphasizing that the school in question is a secondary school, not a primary school, so the students who will be using the school’s library are teenagers, not young children. My understanding is that secondary schools in the U.K. generally include students aged from eleven at the youngest to sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen at the oldest, making them roughly equivalent to what we here in the U.S. call “middle school” and “high school” put together.

I personally agree that an anthology book that contains a story about a dominatrix probably isn’t appropriate reading material for young children. I don’t necessarily see it as a problem, though, to have a copy of the book in a secondary school library that is accessible to students eleven and older. For one thing, it’s a book that older students at the school might be interested in, and I don’t think it would be fair to deny older students access to the book on the grounds that it might not be appropriate reading material for the younger students.

It’s also doubtful whether anyone will actually read the book at all, even if it is kept in the school library. Most books in school libraries just sit on the shelf unread for years. At the end of my senior year of high school, my school library was giving away old books that they didn’t want any more for free. I took home a large number of them. I found that most of them had never been checked out at all. Even the ones that had been checked out had mostly only been checked out a few times over the course of many years. The fact that the books in question were seldom or never read may have been part of why the school was getting rid of them, but, even still, the sheer number of books held in school libraries that go completely or almost completely unread is still significant.

On top of this, realistically speaking, many of the students who have access to the library, especially those in the older grade levels, are probably already reading much filthier stories online than anything they might find in a general retail anthology like Gender Euphoria. Fanfiction websites like FanFiction.net (FFN) and Archive of Our Own (AO3) are regularly frequented by teenagers, and they host all kinds of absolutely filthy written materials, including reams upon reams worth of outright pornographic stories. (FFN officially has a rule banning sex stories, but it is almost never enforced. AO3 has no rule against adult content at all.)

ABOVE: Photograph I took myself in May 2018 of the library at the high school in Indiana that I personally graduated from

I do think there is a legitimate, good-faith conversation to be had about which books are appropriate for children to have access to at various ages. The Daily Mail‘s main problem with the book Gender Euphoria, though, seems to be less about the fact that one of the stories happens to be about a dominatrix and more about the fact that the stories are about transgender people.

This suggested by the way the article is laced with blatant transphobia. The article introduces the book Gender Euphoria by calling it “a transgender book,” as though this on its own is supposed to be shocking. It also claims that the unnamed “father” in the story was especially appalled to notice the book’s inclusion on the list, “given his own daughter’s mental health issues after she recently declared herself transgender.” From the way this is worded, I’m assuming that the trans person who is mentioned here is actually either nonbinary or a transgender man and that the article is deliberately misgendering them to delegitimize their identity.

Through this sentence, the article also seems to endorse the popular notion that being transgender is itself a mental illness and that society needs to do everything it possibly can to “prevent” people from being trans so that they (supposedly) won’t have mental health issues. I’ve already debunked this misconception at length in this article I posted in December 2021, in which I explain that statistics consistently indicate that the primary cause of mental health issues among transgender people is not being transgender itself, but rather the widespread bigotry and stigma against trans people, with rejection by one’s own family in particular being strongly correlated with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide.

The Daily Mail article quotes the father as saying “kids at 11 or 12 don’t need this type of ideology drummed into them”—clearly using the word “ideology” to refer to the idea that trans people exist and should be accepted by society, which isn’t so much “ideology” as just basic acceptance. The article also quotes as an authority the Bayswater Support Group, which describes itself on its website as follows:

“We’re a support group for parents whose children make sense of themselves as trans or non binary. We help parents respond sensitively to their child’s search for self-knowledge during the often tumultuous adolescent years. We are wary of medical solutions to gender dysphoria, when exploring gender roles is part of normal child development.”

The group’s page on their website titled “Our Top Ten Tips” encourages parents to respond to a child or young adult who wants to transition (whether socially or medically) “with sceptical counter-arguments.” The same page also claims that allowing a child who wants to socially transition to do so “may not be the best for that child.” The group seems to strongly oppose medical transition for trans people in general. Their list of recommended reading materials for parents of transgender people consists entirely of so-called “gender-critical” (a.k.a. TERF) websites and books. References to them in other British news articles reveal they regularly make statements to the press opposing trans rights. So, basically, they’re a transphobic activist group.

Conclusion

You can probably see why these two articles are paired together. The Daily Mail‘s message seems to be essentially similar to that of Tucker Carlson in the segment on his show that I discussed in this article from May 2021: that supposedly edifying “classic literature” (like Semonides’s poem “Types of Women”) is being thrown out in favor of degenerate filth (like the book Gender Euphoria).

Yet the Daily Mail‘s sensibilities of what is and is not appropriate for students are, shall we say, highly questionable. The Daily Mail seems to find it absolutely shocking that university students wouldn’t be required to read a line in a 2,700-year-old misogynistic poem that approvingly describes a man violently bashing his wife’s teeth in with a rock to make her stop being “nosy.” At the same time, though, in an article directly attached to the first one, they find it equally scandalous that high school students might even be allowed to check out of their own volition from the school library an anthology of stories written by trans, nonbinary, and intersex writers.

The rationale here seems to be that students just need to accept that domestic violence against women is a natural and inevitable part of life, but, at the same time, schools need to do everything they possibly can to prevent students from being exposed to the fact that transgender people exist.

If the instructor at the University of Reading really did cut the line or two about domestic violence from the handout of Semonides’s poem, that’s not a decision I personally agree with. I do think, though, that, at the very least, we should surely all be able to agree that domestic violence against women is much worse than the existence of transgender people. If you’re going to shelter students from one of these things, it should be the former, not the latter.