Exposing Queer Fest and the Attack on Our Children's Minds — with Protect and Teach

Hello everyone, this is Diane Rasmussen with UK College. I'm really happy to be here today

to speak with three amazing women from a group called Protect and Teach, which is based

down in Devon. They do a lot of work to try to protect and safeguard children from the

indoctrination that's happening in our schools and libraries and other institutions around

the country. I would like to say as we go into this that as I believe that really we are a free

speech organization here at UK Column, we do believe that people have the right to access

whatever it is that they feel is important or useful or meaningful or whatever it is that they

need to access, but that there is a difference when it comes to what is being placed in front of

children and the children are why we are here today to be looking at what these issues are,

the things that Protect and Teach are working for and a particular event called Queer Fest,

which we will be talking about in some detail today. And I also want to say as well that the issues

that we will be talking about today are quite sensitive and graphic in nature. So if you do have

children nearby, I would suggest maybe thinking about if you want them to be exposed to this material,

there will also be a written article that goes along with this interview that will show some of

the images and go into some greater detail about the Queer Fest event that we will be speaking about

today and there will be a link to the article that goes along with the write-up for this conversation.

So with that, I'd like to welcome our three guests today. The first one is Kathy Munch who has

interviewed with me previously in UK column and has appeared on UK column news. And we also have

two other women, one is Julie and one is Jenny. So Kathy and Julie and Jenny, welcome to UK column.

Yeah, I think this is such an important topic and I've covered this extensively as a former

librarian and educator myself and having seen these things come into the schools and universities

over the past few years. It seems to be how to have happened relatively quickly and there is

a bit of concern around, you know, what does this mean for the future of the family, for the future

of relationships between men and women as we know them and there are a lot, there are a lot of

different things that we need to look at. So if we, it seems to me that if we get a situation where

we have now where children are being exposed to this content a very young age, you know, even before

puberty and so we can get to them early and then as they develop, then they then start to question

their gender identity, it starts to question their sexuality and honestly a lot of this content

that we're about to talk about today, as I said at the very start, is just not age-appropriate

and in some cases actually illegal, which I think is a very, very alarming situation that we'll

be getting into today. So Kathy, you and I have been having conversations for several months now,

I spoke at your conference last year, which was a great experience and in one of our meetings at

one point, I believe a few months ago, you were talking about an event that you had found out

about called Queer Fest taking place down at Exeter Library, down in Devon and so maybe if you can

sort of talk us through along with Jenny and Julie, kind of what you learned about Queer Fest and

kind of how this has progressed and I'll just let the three of you tell the story and then we'll

catch up from there. So yeah, so we started off, yeah, we started off saying about we were worried

about the Queer Fest and then Jenny, you showed in the books that we've collected. Yeah, so the

manager came down and spoke to us but he seemed a little bit anti-us because he kept talking about

to us, about people like you as though we were the Dregs of Society and causing all the problems

and apparently they had had a lot of email complaints from people like us and then he went on

to criticise people like us. So I think we had his number, didn't we? We did. Well, we've worked

out there with three men at the library, organising this Queer Fest, the manager, someone called

Chris and then another person in the library and he was at the reception. He was at the reception

and he was he was wearing the Progress Pride Lanyard which is the one that supports child

transitioning and he actually came over during our interview to join in with us naughty ladies.

So Jenny was there, Jenny, if you say, explain about the books you had.

Well, can I just clarify, when we actually asked the person at reception, we said that we wanted

to speak to somebody in charge of safeguarding because we had safeguarding concerns to raise

about the Queer Fest and the manager came over and nominated himself as the person that safeguarding

with concerns should be reported to which in itself is a safeguarding concern because they are

supposed to have a designated safeguarding lead for these exact kind of conversations. So the

fact that he intercepted our concerns dismissed them and didn't forward or involved the actual

safeguarding lead. Do you remember when we were writing to them, we couldn't find a safeguarding

lead on the website and there was no safeguarding policy on the website either. It was only the day of our

visit. Yeah, the day of our visit coincidentally the website was updated. So yeah, the manager,

when we started the conversation, we said we've got concerns about the Queer Fest

and I said, I don't understand how a homophobic slur can be deemed acceptable for all ages

and that instantly set him against us and I think it was also Cathy's scarf because he said, well,

who are you? You know, what is this and sort of picked Cathy's scarf up as she was wearing it.

Picked it up and said, what does this mean? We were like, well, it's just a scarf. It was a

green purple and white sort of suffragett colored scarf. But yes, he very quickly formed his opinion

about us and so when I asked him about the book that I was holding which said it was for,

so it was aimed at teachers to print out worksheets to give to kids like photocopian,

you know, used the worksheets in classes and it was to teach children about sexuality.

And I said, you know, can you see any problem with this? And he said no.

Children need to learn about sexuality apparently. Whereas we're very much of the opinion that

children need to be children and sexuality is an adult concern, you know, for teenagers

possibly to explore but definitely not children like the there are age limits for when these

things become appropriate for kids and he did not want to recognize that at all.

And that was obviously just one of the many books we found in the library that argued towards

he told us twice how that he had been excited for the drag queen story that had been there

earlier in the year and then he told us again how he was excited for the

queer fest on that weekend coming and was I appreciate there is an American usage where people

on American podcasts are quite often excited to meet people. He is not American and I didn't

necessarily think that he was using the American usage of the word excited. However, on the day of the

queer fest, on the day of the queer fest, the stalls were all set up in the foyer of the library

which meant that any child who wasn't coming to attend the event but was merely wanting to return

the library books was obliged to go through the stalls which had inappropriate materials on them

in my view for children to see any children to see. There were phone buildings weren't there,

there were models of a father. Yes, there were leaflets, there was a banner on chemsex and HIV

and there was a singer who was singing about fentanyl and saying how great fentanyl was and

everyone should try it. She was actually talking about a song called femtanyl which is obviously a

play on the drug fentanyl but to me to the observers that went in for us and to the people listening

it was obviously that you should try the drug fentanyl. There was an inappropriate leaflets on most

of the stands wasn't there. A lot of them were leading were from LGBT queer groups offering

services to children where they could get in touch with them directly and come down to their

offices if they thought that they were trans or LGBT but the emphasis seemed to be much on the

trance. There was a QR code to click on the sweetie store wasn't there so that if you wanted a

free sweetie they would capture your online information so as in your digital ID would be stored by

them in exchange for a sweetie and that was particularly complained about and we were told that

there was nothing wrong with it because sweeties aren't just for children which I thought was

disingenuous to say the least. I think it's well we were concerned about the people going there

and running it because we did directly ask him if they'd all been dbs checked which I know

isn't a foolproof guarantee and they said no there's some of them were but some of them were

known to the library whatever that means and because they don't they don't have to legally do that

because they're not having a one-to-one contact with a child because it's sort of like a stall if

you like they don't have to dbs check them legally anyway but it was just the fact that there was

this attitude that anybody who was queer because we're going to be able to go in and be around them

be available to the children and this was again against what we'd agreed we'd he'd said to us that

it wouldn't be near that where the children would be and that their children would be unable to go

in without an adult with them and we know that in a library from the age of eight years old children

can go in unaccompanied so they would have been met at the doorway and there was out there

of the other group running it and out there were in front of the doorway with the table so as

children came in they would immediately be greeted by a man with the out there together t-shirt on

there were also quite a few men who were pretending to be women who were greeters as well

and wandering around now we have a real issue with this because we believe that you are

you are abusing a child's cognitive ability to recognise the difference between men and women

and in that situation you're not seeing them in the street and your mum then saying to you oh no

that's actually a man you're actually seeing them in a library where everyone is telling you

that is a woman you are seeing a woman and that is just something that we really strongly disagree

with I don't know what either you you or Jenny want to add to that I think it is very disruptive

to a child's development to have these conundrums presented at a time when their own sense of

self hasn't fully developed what do you think Jenny with having young children I mean what's

your feeling on that sort of situation what's it you know if you find out your child have been to

that library well that's the thing that's why when we spoke to the manager we said you know

we're not saying don't host the event at all we are saying this is not appropriate for children

and they have a safeguarding duty to children um so it should never have been held in such a

public part of the library um the fact that children had to walk past all these things that

I just I can't imagine if that little girl that we saw opposite the Eddie Stone Trust

sign which had you know talked to us about HIV condoms and chem sex and I had never heard of that

until I saw that poster knowing what that is it's a very very disturbing thing and

to have it normalized to young children in that way is just it should be so obviously a safeguarding

fail that the fact that it's not is another safeguarding fail in itself the fact that there's

been no reaction to this really from the council or the library um yeah right so if I could come in

here and say just ask which of you are brave enough to explain what chem sex actually is because

it was not a term that I was familiar with until I started looking into queer fest okay great thank you

yeah chem sex chem sex is um a way that some gay men choose to reduce their inhibitions by taking

a cocktail of drugs and I cannot for the for the life of me come up with the particular drugs

that they use but there was a very good article I think on the sub stack that I read by a young man

who effectively was self-harming um by going in for chem sex sex and he said that once once the

drugs had taken hold he couldn't hold back he couldn't he he wouldn't say no to anything and he was

doing things which in retrospect he thinks were very damaging to his body and and psychologically

but once you are in the control of the drug you are just completely overtaken with a lust that you

can't control um it is therefore a very dangerous thing to put before children because you don't want

them engaging in that sort of behavior because it's damaging yeah I mean just you know the obviously

the thana was talking it would said chem sex and they were obviously there to educate people about

the dangers of chem sex so again with the with the um the deal dough that was to measure your

girth for a condom which they offer from the age of 13 years up so again they're saying they're

doing sex education and the children who are having sex at 13 need to know how to use a condom

um and you know obviously we could argue that a different way as to that as we you know

a child approaching that group saying I'm 13 having sex is different to an eight-year-old

well we think the child was about seven six or seven and she's in a little yellow dress you see

him in the photo in the article and she's looking directly at the table why does she need to know

about condoms um fitting for and for 13-year-olds and she sees the word chem sex that's now in her

head that's never going to go so if someone says to her later was a teenager have you ever tried

chem sex she's going to say oh chem sex well how is it the library you know oh yeah that's okay

isn't it it's a round i've seen it advertised yeah sure i know about that you know it's it's

it's so liminal isn't it yes liminal messaging yeah um and it's making it and it was inappropriate and

i'm really cross that there were a lot of people there who were say who would have had safeguarding

training because directly opposite the table with all this awful stuff on was the mental health team

now it's it's beyond me they say that they would did the right safeguarding that none of those

safeguarding people went to the table and said look i think you should tuck that back a bit you know

we've got young children going through here they seem to just throw everything out the window

because it's the LGBTQ well that's it just open up for everything when we talk about the issues

that are raised with this there are a couple of things that i want to sort of emphasize to the

audience one is that chem sex even if they're saying that they're doing it to warn about the

dangers of it is essentially letting children even know about the possibility of taking illegal

drugs to achieve this you know sexual goal um so we have not only the questions around the

miracle the world the ethical issues that surround how young we should be teaching children

about sexual activity of any kind you know LGBTQ or otherwise and now we're talking about something

that is actually illegal that whether or not they're saying it's a good idea or a bad idea it's

still in their heads as a possibility and and so i think there are questions around that because

if we talk about things that are considered illegal even if we look at let's say underage drinking

so if you're over a certain age and you're allowed to drink alcohol according to the law

what happens when you're younger and i know this from my younger days when i was at university and

i was 18 and i wanted to drink because my friends were drinking and it was available even though it

wasn't legal until i was 21 where i was in america at the time so i think that there are

temptations that can be raised in the minds of young people because they're saying oh it's

if it's forbidden then sometimes it seems like that might make them want to do something more

so if they know about these possibilities for sexual activity and for drug use and and for things

that are actually in this case illegal regardless of whatever age you are taking illegal drugs

then we're promoting illegal activity from children as sounds like as young as seven or eight years old

so we have to look at this from the the bigger perspective as well is that even on a sort of a

practical low level it's it's dangerous but what is actually being promoted here well it's the

the issue of the sexualization of children and what does that mean well it depends on how far you

want to go with it but if we look at some of the globalist policies from the United Nations and

from the world economic forum world health organization a lot of them are taking the position

that children are sexual beings from birth and that there are no age restrictions necessary or

expected or even desires because they need to be learning about things from a very early age

so there are a lot of questions obviously about what this means for putting these things into

the minds of children are we setting them up for pedophilia because if they will then know what

this means so that if they are approached by the likes of few Edwards and Jimmy Savile and

others that we know the grooming gangs whether they're Asian grooming gangs or British grooming

gangs that these things are have been happening for some time in this country they will continue to

happen and you know so exactly what does this mean for the future of our children and the safety

and the future of the family and what this means for reproductive situations between men and women

so with that I don't know if any of you have anything to respond to that because these are

larger issues that we're looking at so do you want to take anything out from there to see what are

your thoughts on this one of the things you said was about children being groomed for pedophilia

but in some ways it's almost worse than that because one of the ways that social workers used to

detect children who were potentially the targets of pedophiles was if those children knew in

age inappropriate things about sexual activity if you are telling all the children about all the

sexual activities that are possible then the social worker no longer has the red flags where she can

identify children who may be being subjected to pedophilia because all the children are being

taught it so it actually makes it harder to detect the activities of pedophiles if that makes sense

yeah and going back to your alcohol thing as well you it's not advertised on the television

and for under 18s you're not supposed to be have alcohol being advertised like it used to be

in the past it's usually got to be after the watershed and stuff like that posters smoking is

exactly the same and yet we're advertising like you say sex to very young children all over the

place because we we're calling it LGBTQ no one is challenging it as we found with the council

no one in the council wants to take it on no one with safeguarding wants to take it on the police

don't want to take it on we're going we're continuing with these groups aren't we I mean

Jenny knows more about the council side of it because you have a lot more contact with the group

you know that are actually have went along to the library okay yeah so um obviously before the

event we wrote to all the councillors to say we are really concerned about this two of the councillors

listened to us and decided to attend the event to see what actually happened we decided not to go

in the end because we didn't want to have any kind of arguments with the manager in front of children

or anything like that um the councillors that did attend have made multiple complaints and safeguarding

issues issues about GDPR obviously with the data collection for sweeties the data collection for

sweeties thing was completely dismissed as nobody's responsible for that data so you know the

council don't have responsibility apparently so it's all this dismissal of proper safeguarding

and it's all because it's attached to LGBTQ it's the same thing that we've seen happen with the

grooming gangs like Diane said where um because of the attachment to the protected characteristic

and the fear of um offending people nobody will confront safeguarding issues surrounding

these events or these groups the protected characteristics are to protect against unlawful

discrimination and harassment and having an opinion and expressing it even causing offence

um of the sort the where somebody feels go that wasn't a very nice thing to say none of those are

unlawful um and having a protected characteristic doesn't protect you um against people having

thoughts about you um so I think that the whole equality act has been misplayed for the last 15

years and thankfully the Supreme Court um set out the the the the true position um for the protected

characteristics as they have always been and people need to start taking notice of that judgment

and getting their beans in a row again um but it's been how many months now is it nine months

yeah and we're still or yeah nine months and we're still not there are we

um yeah so we're continuing to raise the issue um with the council with the police we're following

up we complained to the police because they have actually broken the law um which was um exposing

children to inappropriate material wasn't it yes because if you are if you say go to an art gallery

so someone will say as an argument you go to an art gallery and there's part of the art gallery has

very strong art in it lots of nudity and stuff like that the art gallery would have a responsibility

to put a sign up for anyone going in there that this was maybe adults only whereas um the

library is has to have exactly the same thing I'm not letting of not exposing children to talk to

it in the whole of the library they can't put a sign up and say oh by the way you shouldn't go

to section whatever the whole of the library has to be safe for children so if they have books that

are not suitable for children they have to be very separate from the children's library so that's

where they were breaking the rule on that um it's the protection of children at 1978 um so for

example a sex shop in a high street they on their door would say that no children are allowed in

so that's it so if you then take your child into there and they see that stuff you as a parent or

the the adult was rot in the wrong because you went against what the shop was telling you the

telling exactly what they were doing the art gallery was telling you that in one of their galleries

there is this don't go in and you made the decision to take the child in a library is completely

different then again like I say eight-year-olds how many people have dropped their children off

at the library with their books and said right you go on in have a look at the books I'm just going

to unpack the car and then I'll come in and we'll see what books you've chosen um what what else would

you think we could say about the queer fest then yeah it's run up is this is the second year of

the queer fest so what we're hoping is that we won't have a third year of the queer fest this year

so that will be something we're keeping an eye on because we feel we've raised major issues with

libraries unlimited and the council and people working within the library to make them really

think that what they're doing they hopefully start thinking of what they're doing is not right

um I don't think we'll be able to persuade them however amazing we may be able to prevent them

from following their instincts

yes if

yeah if I can say one more thing about these groups as well they're actually moving into mental

health now and doing offering training on mental health for teachers for children and also going

into extremism and offering schools training on extremism so they're moving the goalposts so they

they want to stay in the schools they're looking I think personally at the way the winds blowing

I'm thinking right the LGBTQ may not be the way to go in the future let's go in get some mental

health programs going let's go and get some training for children on extremism I'm sure misogyny

will come into it as well so these people work pushing a particular cluster of agendas and taking

them into the school to educate both the children and the teachers on it and they do it at

public expense because they are funded yeah and then they offer this thing like called the rainbow

award which we've talked about the rainbow flag award rainbow flag award yeah which means that

one teacher and one governor has been trained in this so what other flags will be coming up the

anti-extremist flag yeah I think queer theory is a tool it's a tool to unpick thousands of years

of civilisation and take us back to a dark age yeah from my point of view exeter at the start of

this because in 2008 we had a conference at Exeter University on queering primary education so

that was a long time ago and they now the people involved in that now run teacher training at Exeter

University so right back then they were talking about primary school children and how to queer them

which is breaking down boundaries that's what it's all about okay if we could talk about councils

for just a minute one of the things that I have been looking into for the last few months

in my reporting is the issue of what we can do locally to fight these larger agendas so as I

mentioned just a minute ago about the globalist organizations for example that are pushing this

agenda of putting this material in front of children and the you and for you know has the

convention of the rights the child which basically says the child has the same rights as an adult

and of course those of those of us who are working including yourselves of protecting teach who are

working to expose these things as well as a Scottish student for education which is a group that

I've worked with for some time up in Scotland when we look at these local approaches to

speaking out and trying to prevent or stop or reverse things that they're doing in the schools

I think this is a very important issue because individually it seems too big for you know an

individual parent or an individual group of people to to fight against something that is so

big and so far beyond anyone group or anyone council or anyone group of parents and so one of

the things that I've been trying to do with some of this is to highlight work that local councils

are doing whether it's to the benefit of the people or whether it's adults or children or otherwise

and so I guess if we can talk a little bit more about how you have found this because I know

that protect and teach although you are all based in Devon that there are parents all over the

country who are involved in working with you to stop whatever it is that's happening in their schools

and libraries so I'd be interested to hear from you as leaders of protect and teach

how has this played out in other areas around the country what are some examples of things that

parents have been doing and maybe can continue to do because I think the only way to to fight

against some of this is to take local action yeah what we find from parents is that they're contacting

us having found this going on in their school library either the books or the pride festivals

or the celebrating of LGBTQ history was it we call months we never sure how long they go on for

so that's there at the initial contact that we have and we can help them write letters

we have obviously people who've been doing it all over the country anyway that will come in and

help us as well give us advice on what worked contacting the school contacting the head contacting

the governors contacting their local council contacting their MP now with a lot of these people they

really don't understand so what they say is oh yes we're LGBTQ friendly and they have no idea

what comes in under the after the B the you know that's the issue and when you actually explain

to them or show them many of them are really shocked we've had headmasters who have actually been

like well no we're fine with this books an LGBTQ book in our library in our school library we like

all the children to read it as one of the books of the you know the list that they we like them to read

and then when you actually show them the book and get them to sit down and read it you can see

that immediately they had no idea what was in that book they didn't have time to go through all

this stuff they rely on people were probably like you Diana's a librarian to almost do like an

alternative review of books and say this is why this book isn't bad because they don't have the time

to put the work in they rely on parents they rely maybe on groups like us to write to them and

point out what's wrong with what they're doing and but some of the more vocal parents feel very alone

because yeah the the first thing the school will tell you when you approach them is that you're the

only person raising issues about this and if that person becomes more vocal and keeps going in

and keeps raising the issues then eventually they get to the position where they are that their

email address is blocked by the school and they're told that they may not go onto the school

premises anymore which if your child is going there five days a week is a somewhat concerning

position to be in so we have quite a lot of upset parents contacting us and mostly they're just

incredibly relieved that they're not the only person in the world who's having these issues

yeah so at the moment we've got a parent who's contacted us who's trying to find out about their

child who's going to be talked about pornography and consent at the age of 13 now they want to find

out what the lesson is and they're having trouble the schools like you know because this comes

into PHSE which means they can't withdraw their child they can withdraw their child from sex ed

they can't withdraw them from PHSE it's compulsory but they then can't find out exactly what you

going to tell them about pornography what are you what are they going to be seeing you know that

what how are you going to explain consent and their very the school is really vague because we know

from the Gillick law and everything and again from this queer fest 13-year-olds getting condoms was

something that they advertised on one of their stands so if their attitudes is your 13 you need

to know all about pornography condoms where you can get them from where you can access them from

that is really dangerous yeah and like Diane said it's it can feel too much for one person or

even one small group of people we definitely feel very overwhelmed sometimes just with the

amount we've got going in debon and I think that's because a lot of it comes from the council

and it's their responsibility not ours it's their responsibility to clean it up

at the moment councils are run mostly by very left-wing civil servants who are fully on board

with all these ideologies and councillors that you know are elected on political

reasons so for example the book lists at Cathy was talking about

the Devon council education pages have the LGBTQ plus reading list for primary school

so obviously a lot of schools are just going to go and click on to the reading lists provided by

the council by the books that are on that list and consider their library stocked they don't have

the time as Cathy said to do the proper research and the council is one of the local safeguarding

partners defined by working together so they have the responsibility to provide proper safeguarding

in all of these areas that are their responsibility including you know education libraries

send provision health care there's so many aspects where it really comes back to the council

need to deal with this properly and at the moment they're not. Instead of using common sense they're

using groups like the intercontrast in Devon or LGBT youth Scotland up in Scotland you know

pride and sorry over there there's a very common theme running through these groups and it's

this access to children for queer ideology and it it should be a huge red flag.

I think it's important to remind viewers that if you didn't know this already that LGBT

Scotland I know about in particular has had a convicted eventually convicted child sex offenders

working at the very top of its organization and that this is something that we've reported

on previously on UK column this is not a secret necessarily but they do hide all that behind you

know sort of this appearing inclusive appearing diverse and they use that as kind of this cover

story for what is actually going on at least in the particular case of LGBT Scotland not to say

that that's necessarily the only group that we need to be looking at but I do know about that

when in particular that is fully documented that that has gone on in the past and further in the

past as well as more recently so here's like now yeah James Rennie one of our arguments from the

start about why this is so dangerous has always been that if you basically ring fence any group

of men and say that this group of men are safe then the most predatory men are going to use that

as a way of accessing children so we've seen it in scout leaders we've seen it in priests

you cannot do that to any group of men it's just right and if we look at Scotland's LGBT

inclusive education program which is quite it's you know sort of required and embedded in the

curriculum in Scotland and we can see this very clearly that it's it's Scottish government policy

everyone in the country has to be teaching this LGBT inclusive education portion so it's the PSHE

whatever you call it locally it's got a few different names and that's going on in Scotland

I think we're going to see this even more as well in England and Wales with the Bridget Phillips

and the Education Secretary and sort of the legislation that she's trying to come up with that

will make the national curriculum even more national and even more rigid that it is currently

regardless of where the child is being schooled that this is all going to be even more embedded

into the required national curriculum down here in England as well so I think that this is not

unfortunately going away anytime soon I keep hearing you know sort of moments where people

are saying well we think that this some of this is starting to calm down that this agenda maybe

they're going away you know because we've seen just in you know very recently of course we've seen

the Darlington nurses who won their case around not having a biological man in the women's

changing rooms in the Darlington hospital so the Darlington nurses have won their case very recently

that's great we also see you know from last year the UK Supreme Court's ruling about the definition

of a woman which worked in the favor of women but the also the problem is that we're not seeing it

necessarily in all across all all organizations I think what's happened in some cases is that it's

actually inflamed the argument a bit more and made the people who believe that being biased towards

let's say it's standard definitions of what men and women are it's made them even angrier and

made them even more prone to fighting out against what they believe is the right thing to be doing

which is this sort of twisting around of genders and you know sexual content of any type of you

know if any age to children who are very young and so I think the last we're unfortunately just

about the time one thing I want to touch on when we go into where is this coming from so we've

got the globalist policies but we've also got from the academic side and I can say this as well as

a former academic and a former librarian who sort of lost that that stage in my career to

speaking out against this is the issue of queer theory and when we talk about queer theory I'd like

to hear you from all of you just quickly about what what it means to you and how you understand it

but when we look at queer theory from a professional librarian perspective they're they're saying in

the the library literature that queer theory is important even in library catalogs which was

my background as as someone who taught and and practiced library cataloging for several years

that queer theory needs to be embedded into the library catalog and this comes from you know

even the work of Emily Trebenzki who was a previous president of the American Library Association

which works collaboratively and has a reciprocal accreditation agreements with Syllip which is

the library organization here in the UK which I am no longer a member of because I'm no longer

allowed to practice as a librarian because of the things that positions I took on these things

so queer theory means if we're presenting bias in the catalog it means that we're presenting

traditional notions of sex and sexuality and these things and so that's saying well we can't do that

because it's not normal to be normal but it's it's we need to be presenting these other

versions of what's going on into the catalog yeah I think we've got boundaries for a reason for

very good reasons and the fact that queer theory just seeks to destroy all those boundaries

and deny reality it's a really destabilizing idea set of ideas and I think that's the whole point

it's very very sinister and dark and definitely not suitable for children

yeah no this I believe goes beyond the the issue of the content and the books it goes beyond

the the objects that they were presented with a queer fest it does it goes into something much into

a much darker place and that's where we need to be focusing on what is this actually doing to

society what is it doing to existence of families as we know them and you know what is that

please going on and you as we said earlier in this conversation about LGBT kind of being exempt

safeguarding or you know what what is the difference here between what they're doing and let's say

something else that we wouldn't say would be appropriate to children for example having access to

guns which I would say you know yeah we wouldn't want children to be able to check out a gun from a

library because you know you can check out objects as well as books and libraries but is that any

different from some of these contents where some of the library books that I've looked at

that are written for children young adults are presenting sexual acts and names of things that

I am not even aware of and have never heard of at my age so how is this okay for it to be presented to

young children yeah so with that I guess I said we're just about about time but I want to ask

I'll three of you if you have any other final things that you would like to say that we haven't

had a chance to say today um the thing that I wanted to get to that we've not managed to is the fact

that those councillors that did listen to us and did attend the event saw the safeguarding red flags

are raising a motion for an improvement to safeguarding processes and Devon at the next full

council meeting which is in February I forgot on the actual date but it will be very interesting to

see how councillors actually vote will they actually vote against safeguarding because they're so

caught up in this ideology um I suspect they might which I think is very very disturbing because

everybody should be for a better safeguarding of children as everybody's responsibility

um and I suspect a lot of them are going to duck that responsibility but we'll see yeah thank you

well I'll follow I'll continue to follow that meeting and hopefully we can report on it when we see

the outcome of the meeting sure yeah absolutely from my point of view it's the way councils work

having done a lot of work now in the past couple of years within councils I really do believe that

a council that that part is the main part is like Labour Lib Dems Conservative shouldn't be involved

at council level it means that they stick to the party line and so what we find in Devon in

particular a huge number of Lib Dems and they stick to the Lib Dem party line of LGBTQ and trans

women or women so you know that's what the councillors then without even understanding this in any form

that's what they'll go for each time so that was how I feel let's discuss how let's discuss more

about councils I think that's where the secret is and Diane thank you very much for your work on

this and for talking to us today it's been interesting and a pleasure yes thank you

yeah thank you so much very much and we will continue to follow the developments

and I just want to say I'm closing that again going back to the idea of local action is really

important and so I want to say that you ladies have been doing amazing work Dan Devon and I'm

really happy that you are leading this action around the country and I hope that any parents or any

concerned individuals in this country would be able to get in touch with you so I will provide a

link to the website for protect and teach along with this interview along with the written article

that shows again the very graphic images that were taken showing some of the things that were

happening at queer fest so I will also encourage listeners to go follow up and and look at the

visuals that and the additional information that you have provided in that article so again

Julie and Jenny and and Kathy thank you for your time this morning and I really appreciate

your bravery and your honesty and all of your hard work so thank you all very much and thank you

to the audience for listening today thank you so much