Posted on November 15, 2021 at 8:45 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Library catalogues and school curricula are under increased scrutiny, and two recent examples of this include one book in particular.
Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe is — or was — on the shelves at the library in South Carolina’s Fort Mill School District and Kansas’s Goddard School District.
In the case of the former, Gov. Henry McMaster wrote a letter to the South Carolina Department of Education asking it to remove Gender Queer from all schools in the state and to investigate other “inappropriate books and materials,” reports The Hill.
And in the latter case, Gender Queer is among the twenty-nine books that have been pulled from the Goddard district’s libraries.
A parent expressed concern about the language in The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and then submitted a list of over two dozen other books he questioned, reports NPR’s Wichita station, which has a complete list of the books that are being reviewed by a district official and school librarians.
Gender Queer, which is on the list, is a graphic novel detailing the author’s journey of self-identity.
According to the book’s blurb, it began as way to explain what means to be nonbinary and asexual to Kobabe’s family.
Two school board members in a Virginia district, meanwhile, said they’d like to see books removed from school libraries be burned.
Comments came at a meeting in which the Spotsylvania County School Board voted to have staff remove books with “sexually explicit” material from libraries, reports the local NBC affiliate, with a different LGBTQ book serving as the impetus for complaints.
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Categories: Today in Books