Guest post by James Bates

Gender Community Lending Library is a non-profit dedicated to lending texts on transgender topics to people across the UK. Funded by small donations, we stock titles generously donated by publishers ranging from Verso to Rutgers, and now SAGE. Our users access the library catalogue online, requesting books that are mailed to them for free.

Most of our users have no access to university libraries and cannot afford academic and reference texts. Crucially, GCLL stocks not just memoirs and novels, but a collection of scholarly texts in the relatively new field of Transgender Studies. By sharing cutting edge research, we help to ensure a fair and equitable relationship between researchers and the communities they study.

GCLL's budget for new books is extremely limited. SAGE's generous donation of the Encyclopedia of Transgender Studies allows us to stock a book that would not otherwise have been affordable to us, but will now be accessible to independent researchers, transgender writers, and interested community members alike. Keeping our academic collection current, diverse, and comprehensive is vital to supporting these people, and the Encyclopedia of Transgender Studies furthers all these goals.

James Bates is the founder of Gender Community Lending Library