By aurora linnea
It’s been a tough year for books. The American Library Association (ALA) tallied 729 attempts to purge materials from the shelves of public libraries, schools, and universities in 2021, more than double 2020’s total and the highest number since the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom started counting two decades ago. In April, PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom of expression, published its “Banned in the USA” report documenting 1,145 titles targeted for banishment from school libraries between July 2021 and March 2022.
A note on PEN America’s definition of a “ban.” The organization considers a book to be banned if it is removed from circulation to undergo review following a challenge, even if it is later restored to the collection. This temporary removal scenario is in fact the breed of “ban” most frequently cited in their report, comprising 46% of the total. Hence, almost half of PEN America’s banned books eventually found their way back to the shelves, where readers could access them once again.
But a ban is a ban even when it’s not quite one, and thank goodness the ALA and PEN America are here to rail against such brazen repression—especially since the books imperiled by the past year’s banning frenzy are those that highlight “the lives and experiences of people from marginalized communities,” to quote Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Many are books about race, racism, and civil rights activism, or books starring protagonists of color. Quite a few are sex education guides, the classic prey of the censorious. There are books about rape on the verboten list, along with books about mental illness and suicide. At least one picture book made it to the chopping block for its risque illustrations of seahorse mating rituals. And 33%, according to PEN America’s report, are books that concern themselves with the nebulous miscellany of issues thrown together to stew unhappily in that oversized overused bucket marked “LGBTQ+ themes.”
The most oft-banned book, challenged in 30 school districts, is the graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019), by Maia Kobabe. The ALA explains that the title has been “banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images.” Hailed by its publisher as a “useful and touching guide on gender identity – what it means and how to think about it,” Gender Queer is Kobabe’s tale of her evolution from a female child uncomfortable with femininity to a nonbinary asexual twenty-something who demands that others refer to her by the uniquely obnoxious pronouns “e/em/eir.” Included in this “useful and touching guide” is an illustration of the author tricked out in a strap-on so that her partner may simulate fellatio on the ersatz appendage. It also pictures Kobabe’s Plato-inspired adolescent sexual fantasy of a young boy having his penis fondled by a kneeling beardy elder (altogether the wrong sort of “touching,” if I’m remembering those second-grade “good touch/bad touch” lessons correctly). Whether or not one believes these images have a place in schools, objecting to them as “sexually explicit” does not seem symptomatic of pearl-clutching hysteria.
I am a librarian and a writer and an irremediable bookworm. I’d be a traitor to my vocations if I did not oppose banning books. Selectively prohibiting access to literature is a strategy for regulating public consciousness, authoritarian by default. But one can be against bans and nonetheless recognize that books can cause harm. Literature is neither neutral nor inherently benign. Every book is a product of its creator’s worldview, and every book’s purpose is to persuade others to adopt that view as their own—there is indeed a moral to every story. By shaping minds, books shape society; that is their power in the world and it is a real one. The books that people are given to read therefore have just as much of a role in molding minds as those people are denied. A book ban is a blunt tool, in truth. Clumsy, transparently tyrannical. A far more elegant approach to mind control is the institutional promotion of “approved” texts.
There are currently at least 30 copies of Gender Queer: A Memoir circulating through public and university libraries in the state of Maine, where I live. There are no copies of Janice Raymond’s Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (2021).
As an institutionally endorsed text, what’s the harm of Gender Queer? Its strap-on blowjob cartoon is unlikely to sully the innocence of today’s youth, given that most kids will have been exposed to more hardcore imagery via online pornography by age eleven, so we can set aside the surface cringiness and train our sights instead on its ideological underpinning. To give an example: the book depicts twelve-year-old Kobabe fantasizing about developing breast cancer as an excuse to have the double mastectomy she longs for. She loathes her breasts, she wants them surgically removed. This fantasy is normalized for readers as a phase in the author’s journey of self-becoming rather than questioned as a troubling manifestation of body hatred. Later in the book, the author reveals that now, at 28, she dreams of “top surgery.”
The message to young people is that alienation from one’s biological body is natural, that it has nothing to do with trauma or cultural pathologies but emanates spontaneously from within when a person is “born in the wrong body,” and that relief comes not through repairing the shattered relationship between body and self, but through medical mutilation.
This message is harmful for teenagers. It is worse for kindergartners.
Trans-themed picture books have been trending in the publishing world over the last several years, cheerfully illustrated cute and colorful little tracts of gender ideology proselytism for the storytime set. They are read by teachers in elementary school classrooms and by drag queens at public library story hours. With their wholesome tales of teddy bears, friendship, ultra-inclusive multicultural hug fests and cathartic haircuts, these texts tend to escape the ire inflamed by publications like Gender Queer. Of the ten picture books I perused for this essay, only I am Jazz (2014), by TV celebrity “trans girl” Jazz Jennings and his adult ally Jessica Herthel, suffered an attempted banning in 2021. Yet all of these books warrant our suspicion, since all share the same propagandistic purpose: to initiate children at the earliest possible age into the cult of gender identity.
Initiation begins with a lesson in taxonomy. It is crucial that children learn to assign gender labels correctly, for how else will they know what they are? So, what is a girl? And what is a boy?
If we’re to take it from Introducing Teddy (2016), a girl is someone with a traditionally feminine name – Thomas the eddy’s chosen girl-name is “Tilly” – who wears hair accessories. The grand moment of gender-euphoric self-becoming occurs in this book when Thomas, having revealed that he is in his heart “a girl teddy, not a boy teddy,” takes off his bow tie and clips it to the tuft of fur atop his head. Now it is a bow, and he is a girl.
My Sister Daisy (2021) also relies upon the formula of “feminine name + hair accessory = girl.” The “sister” in question summons his inner girl by christening himself after a “beautiful flower” and donning a flower crown. Thus we see that a girl is someone with an affinity for flowers. Also: fairies, ruffles, hearts, unicorns, cleanliness. Dresses are a clear giveaway of girlhood, so too long hair. The “hairstyle epiphany” is a consistent feature of trans-themed picture books. Children “assigned male at birth” yearn to grow out their hair in order to live as the girls they know themselves to be, while children “assigned female at birth” daydream about trips to the barber shop to be sheared of their errant girliness.
Color preferences are also key. “As long as I can remember, my favorite color has been pink,” asserts Jazz in I am Jazz. From an early age it was apparent to him that he was a girl because he loved pink, along with other “girly stuff” like ballet, applying cosmetics, and wobbling about in high-heeled shoes. His role models included mermaids and princesses (girly girls!); he thought “girl thoughts” and dreamt “girl dreams.” The only indication of the contents of “girl thoughts” or “girl dreams” comes when Jazz describes his childhood hopes of becoming “a beauuuuuuuuutiful lady.”
Unlike a girl, a boy is someone with a traditionally masculine name – Jack, Calvin, Aidan, Maddox, etc. – who does not wear hair accessories, baseball caps being something of an exception. Boyhood’s uniform consists of pants or cargo shorts, t-shirts, and sneakers; for more formal affairs, a fedora hat and tie are suitably boyish, as demonstrated in Jack (Not Jackie!) (2018). With regards to swimwear, the eponymous protagonist of Calvin (2021) shows that she is “a boy in [her] heart and a boy in [her] brain” by fantasizing “about swim trunks like [her] dad and brother wore.” Obviously, as per the above discussion of hairstyle epiphanies, short hair is boy hair. Blue is boyhood’s signature color. While girls accessorize and dance and bake cupcakes with their mothers, boys prefer more vigorous physical activities, be it skateboarding like Aidan in When Aidan became a Brother (2019) or running about at high speed, like Jack in Jack (Not Jackie!). From Aidan and Jack we also gather that a boy is someone who enjoys being outdoors and getting muddy. Boys play with dinosaurs and toy cars; boys like bugs and lions. Intriguingly, both I’m Not a Girl: A Transgender Story (2019) and It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book about Gender Identity (2019) associate boyhood with swords. (I leave it up to you to decode that particular tidbit of heavy-handed symbolism.) And as girls are sweetly dreaming their girl dreams of maturing into “beauuuuuuuuuuuuutiful ladies,” boys suit up in capes to save the world as superheroes.
A girl is a pink fairy with a flower in her long flowing hair. A boy is a blue sword-wielding rough-and-tumble savior. Sex-role stereotype lesson complete.
Next, children are instructed on the extreme importance of knowing whether you are a boy or a girl. “Whether you feel like a boy, a girl, both, or neither, or if you describe yourself another way, that is your gender identity,” explains Theresa Thorn, author of the “sweet, straightforward exploration of gender identity” It Feels Good to be Yourself. But what if you don’t know your gender identity? Well then, good luck ever being your True Self! The theory that gender lurks within every person’s innermost depths as selfhood’s core is pivotal to trans-themed picture books. In each story, a child’s True Self joyfully emerges when s/he reveals her or his gender identity, which was formerly concealed by a fleshy obstruction, i.e. the body. Attaining True Selfhood is presented as life’s paramount goal, its pursuit something like the Buddhist striving towards nirvana. Only here, sublime bliss is accessible not through meditation but through gender, self-actualization’s holy grail. Children unsure of their gender identity are therefore encouraged to devote much time and energy to unearthing it. To return to the ever-straightforward It Feels Good to Be Yourself: “You might feel like a boy. You might feel like a girl. You might feel like both boy and girl—or like neither. You might feel like your gender changes from day to day or from year to year. …You might not be sure yet. Maybe you’re still figuring it out. Your feelings about your gender are real. Listen to your heart.” And when your heart has finally informed you of your gender, young grasshopper, then, and only then will you be your True Self.
What are Your Words?: A Book about Pronouns (2021) is another book that enjoins children to pass their tender youths contemplating the minutiae of gender identity. In the story, a child of unspecified sex named Ari is visited by his/her Uncle Lior, who is nonbinary and consequently fixated upon pronouns. “What are your words, Ari?” asks Uncle Lior, prompting the child to spend from noon to night brooding on which gendered pronouns “feel right” today. Everyone in Ari’s neighborhood seems certain of their pronouns except for Ari, who grows increasingly agitated by his/her perplexity until a sudden identification with explosives during a fireworks show leads Ari to the conclusion that, today, “they and them feel right.” The authors of What are Your Words? do their darnedest to disconnect gender from sex-role stereotypes by descending into complete incoherence, linking gendered pronouns apparently at random to assorted adjectives, vocations, and genderless phenomena like fireworks. Friendly? They/them! Artistic? Ze/zir! Shy doctor? He/him! Yet this rampant spewing of pronouns across all of creation just functions to further convince children that everything has a gender, that gender is everywhere, and assigning gendered labels to this, that and the other thing should be a primary activity in their lives.
Not only does the preoccupation with gender identity as essential to selfhood promise to squander the childhoods of a generation on anxious fretting over where to position oneself in relation to girl/boy/pink/blue/unicorn/dinosaur stereotypes, it also teaches children to distrust and dismiss their bodies. The body is not the self. The body is merely a container in which the self is confined, restricting its possibilities and obscuring it from others. “I wish…everyone could see the real me,” laments Maddox in I’m Not a Girl. Poor Maddox’s problem is that her body confuses others into thinking she’s a girl when her own distaste for pink makes her know beyond doubt that her True Self is a boy. Calvin is in the same pickle: “Calvin has always known he’s a boy, even though the world sees him as a girl.” Thomas the Teddy, seen as a boy bear due to his bow’s position on his sternum instead of on his head, has always known in his heart that he’s a girl bear. And when Daisy tells his parents he’s a girl, his mom says, “Now we understand what to call her and who she is inside.”
Again and again the child’s selfhood is linked to an “in my heart and in my brain” metaphysical gender identity, while the physical body just gets in the way. Trans-themed picture books enunciate in child-friendly terms the mind/body dualism at the root of patriarchal masculinist ideology. The mind – also termed the heart, soul, or spirit – and the body are separate entities. The mind is valued above the body. Man’s true nature is more in the mind than in the body. The mind is limitless in its possibilities, but the body is limitation, constraint, encumbrance, burden. Man’s mission is to transcend the body and recreate himself as pure mind, pure self. Mind/body dualism has its basis in Man’s contempt for biology, for nature and for life. Its imperative is to efface earthmade reality and replace it with the ethereal artificial stuff of Man’s mind’s devising. Then Man will be his own master, free to be his True Self—his own perfect creation.
Transgenderist propaganda proposes its lesson as something progressive and new, when in fact it is a regurgitation of age-old patriarchal doctrine. Children are taught that their bodies are nothing. They are taught to revere gender, a manmade fiction, as reality, and to reject the body as a lie. To forsake their flesh for the sake of male fantasy.
The specter on the horizon, never mentioned in the trans-themed picture books I read but always looming just beyond the stories’ final pages, is so-called gender medicine. Although in his book Jazz does visit a kindly, wise doctor who “diagnoses” him as transgender – i.e., he has a girl brain in a boy body, a very scientific clinical diagnosis to be sure – we do not read of the medical interventions inflicted on the child whose body fails to outwardly match his or her preferred gender fiction. But given that the books invariably advocate absolute affirmation of children’s gender claims, medical experimentation to “recreate” children’s bodies in the image of gender seems the logical next step. A short haircut will only conceal a female child’s girlhood until her breasts begin to bud, after all. The child who has learned her natural body is “wrong” at worst and an irrelevance at best will be primed to accept, even to seek out, interventions aimed at artificializing the body into conformity with her gender identity, her patriarchally constructed True Self. That child’s course has been charted for her, a path lined with tail-wagging dogs and smiley-face flowers and supportive friends of infinite genders and hip, loving multiethnic adults cheering her on towards a lifetime of hormonal drugs and cosmetic surgeries.
And when, after having been strung along to the path’s end, she perhaps comes to the realization that she was herself all along, that her body was in no way wrong and did not need to change for her to be who she is, truly, the harm will have already been done. In some things there is no going back. The happy ending those lovingly affirmative pink-and-blue picture books promised her never arrives, but of course it doesn’t. Why didn’t anyone tell her not to believe in fairy tales? Someone should have warned her: it’s only a story, little one.
Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.