There is an interesting site which breaks down American voting trends by occupation. Some of it is mysterious — why should pediatricians swing so overwhelmingly to the Democrats? Why should urology be so dominated by Republicans? Readers may insert their own jokes here.
But some of the voting patterns are far from surprising. No one would expect yoga teaching to be a hotbed of radical right-wing activity, for instance, and yogis do indeed push heavily to the left.
Perhaps even less shocking, though, is the realisation that there is one area in which the political left appears to have an absolute clean sweep of the profession. In the book publishing industry 100% of respondents in the survey identify as being on the left, the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy.
To those with friends in publishing, despairing at the regular struggle session-style get-together they are now subjected to in which every conceivable centre-left political orthodoxy is celebrated, this is not a revelation. Although the survey in question is from the US, it is certain that a similar pattern can be found over here, too.
It is only by understanding this that one can make any sense of an otherwise baffling and strikingly badly-written letter which appeared this week in The Bookseller (the trade publication of the book publishing business). The open letter, inaccurately titled “The paradox of tolerance”, is a strange document for many reasons. Not the least is that it is signed anonymously, by figures in the book trade at once both sure of their convictions and also terrified of having their convictions attributed to them. What is the cause of this pseudo-samizdat? What opinion can be so errant that it requires this level of anonymity?
The answer is that the open letter is based around the claim that “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”. From the outset this anonymous letter is framed in Lutherian terms. “Somebody, sooner or later, must speak up,” the authors bravely begin. This is proper “Here I stand” territory. Yet whereas Martin Luther was simply facing down the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms, the anonymous authors of this letter are taking on the might of children´s fiction departments across west London. No wonder they wish to keep their identities secret. The retributions could be unimaginable.
Although The Bookseller claims that it has tried to independently verify that the signatories of the letter are in fact people in the book trade, one does begin to have doubts. For instance, in relation to trans issues the authors believe that “Our industry is still very comfortable about giving this form of prejudice a powerful platform.”
Doubtless referring to the decision of Hachette to publish the fearsome and controversial work known as The Ickabog, by J.K. Rowling, the letter makes the claim that it is perfectly acceptable in the publishing industry to argue that trans people should have “less than full human rights”. Anti-trans sentiment is now so rife that they are forced to make a stand.
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