"Development of Transgender/Gender Expansive Health Outcome Search Tool - How Librarians Can Empower Library Users in Pursuit of IDEA Goals"

Beth Tweedy, University of California, Davis Library

Librarians and archivists often find themselves providing support and specialized skills to users and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, experiences, and backgrounds. These collaborative relationships can be ideal opportunities to further the implementation and practice of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) goals and outcomes, or advocate for them if they are not being pursued or considered. In this presentation I will detail a search tool that I built with subject-specialist researchers to enable clinicians to easily discover medical literature about disparate health outcomes for members of the transgender and gender expansive (TGE) community across a broad range of health concerns in PubMed. This collaboration allowed me to push IDEA literature searching practices out of the library and more directly into the field of clinical practitioners. I will discuss how in this case, and more broadly, the specialized skills that librarians and archivists possess can serve as a gateway toward advocating for IDEA goals and outcomes in the work that users are doing. Finally, I will highlight the how the active inclusion of members of the TGE community in the research process improved the final product both in terms of IDEA goals and outcomes and in its overall function and quality.

"Weaponizing Eugenics: How Libraries Can Support Reproductive Justice"

Tina Liu, McGill University

In a 2019 opinion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that “technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion” and that early abortion and birth control advocates were also eugenicists. While not technically untrue, this is a misleading assertion as the basis of Thomas’ argument disregards how the narrative of family planning shifted from social reform in the 1920s to bodily autonomy in the 2020s. As the eugenics narrative is increasingly used to justify attacks on reproductive autonomy, the role of librarians is key as we can use library collections to contextualise misinformation between abortion, birth control, and eugenics. As restrictions on reproductive rights disproportionately affect racialised and marginalised communities, it is important for librarians to be prepared to challenge this misinformation. My presentation will address the history of eugenics (including the overlap of librarians and eugenicists in the early twentieth century), the overlapping histories in the origins of abortion, birth control, and eugenics movements, and how librarians can better frame this history in collections and library guides to push back against legislative control over reproduction.