When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Gender Assumptions
Posted on June 17, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Stephen Krueger
While taking a course on web accessibility recently, I was jarred by the way the audio description and alt text examples assumed gender: the people in the videos and images were described as women or men—or once, for no apparent reason apart from perhaps the presence of a corduroy blazer, as “a gentleman”—with “she” or “he” pronouns, seemingly chosen based on to appearance. (It’s possible they asked every person in every video or image to self-identify before creating the descriptions, but I rather doubt it.) I am not an expert on that topic, though others are, and it is a compelling rabbit hole—I am currently resisting the urge to stay up too late reading a gender studies thesis and an academic article on TV show audio descriptions and gender instead of writing this blog post. The accessibility course is simply one example of what I want to highlight: the ways assumptions about gender show up in library work.
There are many, many other readily available examples. Some are specific to one area of the field, such as description in archives and cataloging. Historian Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey writes, “When I was redescribing records, I would use terms like ‘a group of boys sledding.’ When I began to examine gendering the subjects of the records, I shifted my language to ‘a group of students sledding.’ It seemed more appropriate since I did not know the gender of everyone in the photo.”1 A study on how catalogers describe gender concludes that “Like members of society at large, catalogers must face their cisnormative biases head-on.”2 Other examples come up in more widespread contexts. In a chapter on gender inclusive hiring in academic libraries, my coauthors and I write that search committees should “avoid assuming a candidate’s gender … In practice, this means not referring to any candidate using gendered language that the candidate has not used for themselves and also not assuming that they would use a certain restroom or join particular employee affinity groups.”3
When I conduct trainings for library workers on trans inclusion, I often refer to the stereotypical question, “Where is the restroom?” Unless you know the gender of the person asking, which you probably don’t since it’s none of your business, any answer that points to one restroom type without mentioning others likely makes assumptions based on their voice or appearance. The gender inclusive response is to list all the restroom types and their locations: e.g., “The women’s restroom is there, the men’s restroom is there, and the all-gender restroom is in the basement down an unlabeled hallway.” (This last bit is, unfortunately, optimistic—many libraries, in my experience, do not have a public all-gender restroom.)
All of these situations are rooted in one of the most basic concepts of gender, one that is both incredibly simple and, for a lot of people, difficult to unlearn. The simple part: you don’t know a person’s gender unless they tell you. Things that do not convey that information include name, voice, pronouns, appearance (e.g., clothing, makeup, jewelry), behavior, and the absence or presence of particular body parts. “Telling you” may mean an individual conversation, a bio, or other public form in which the person self-identifies their gender, or any number of other ways. For an additional layer of complexity, a person’s gender may change multiple times over their life, so information that was accurate at one point may not be later on. This is fine; it is rare that you would really need to know someone’s gender in a work context (or most other situations).
The difficult part is that if you have spent much or all of your life under the unexamined belief that you can tell gender by sight or sound or what someone is called, it can take some practice to break that habit. Perhaps you recognized yourself in the examples above. Perhaps you see a patron with a beard and point them to the men’s room, or one who fits your stereotype of a nonbinary person and point them to the all-gender restroom (assuming your library has one). Perhaps you are on a search committee and assume a candidate’s gender based on the name on the application or how their voice sounds and then take the additional step of assuming their pronouns based on your guess of their gender. Perhaps you describe a person in an archival photo as a woman because they are wearing a dress. Or perhaps none of this applies to you directly. That does not mean you don’t have work to do; I know I still do; being trans myself does not mean I don’t have decades of habit to unlearn.
The preceding two paragraphs apply to the world in general, of course, but my point is that assuming gender is not only a social or personal issue. These assumptions and the harm they do are prevalent throughout library work in all sorts of ways, and all library professionals can benefit from reflecting on how that applies to them.
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References
1. Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey, “Reflections: An Indigenous Non-Binary Experience in Archives and Libraries,” in Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries, ed. by Kalani Keahi Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken. Library Juice Press, 2023, p. 416.
2. Travis Wagner, “Body-Oriented Cataloging as a Method of Inclusive Gender Representation,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 60, no. 6–7 (2022): 641. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2022.2089795.
3. Kalani Keahi Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, Luke Sutherland, and Adrian Williams, “Trans and Gender Diverse Inclusion in Academic Library Hiring,” in Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices, ed. by Katherine M. Houk, Jordan Nielsen, and Jenny Wong-Welch. Association for College and Research Libraries, 2024, p. 104. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_facpub/337.
About the author:
Stephen G. Krueger is an academic librarian in the United States. Ey is the author of Supporting Trans People in Libraries (2019) and co-editor of Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (2023). Learn more at www.stephengkrueger.com.
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