Graphic book about queer identity sets up state’s next culture war
Kathy May was getting her four kids ready for another day at school in late October when she got an urgent voicemail from a friend.
“OMG, OMG, this book,” her friend said, alerting May to a book found by another parent in the library catalog of Keller Independent School District, where their kids go, called “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” by Maia Kobabe.
“I felt sick and disgusted,” May said, recalling text messages her friend sent her showing sexually explicit illustrations from the book. She was angry that any kid could access that kind of book in a public high school without their parents' knowledge.
The 239-page graphic novel depicts Kobabe's journey of gender identity and sexual orientation. Kobabe, who is nonbinary, said it was written to help others who are struggling with gender identity to feel less alone. The book also explores questions around pronouns and hormoneblocking therapies.
“I can absolutely understand the desire of a parent to protect their child from sensitive material. I'm sympathetic to people who have the best interest of young people at heart,” Kobabe, the 32-year-old author based in California said in an interview. “I also want to have the best interest of young people at heart. There are queer youth at every high school — and those students, that's (who) I'm thinking about, is the queer student who is getting left behind.”
May didn't read the book, but what she saw — a few pages of explicit illustrations depicting oral sex — was disturbing to her. It took less than a day for May and other parents to get the book removed from the district. May tweeted that same day that after school officials had been notified, the book was removed from a student's hands.
“Gender Queer” has become
a lightning rod both nationwide and in Texas among some parents and Republican officials who say they’re worried public schools are trying to radicalize students with progressive teachings and literature.
Gov. Greg Abbott and another GOP lawmaker have questioned the book’s presence in schools. Abbott has called for investigations into whether students have access to what he described as “pornographic books” in Texas public schools. And last month, state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, sent a list of some 850 books about race and sexuality — including Kobabe’s — to school districts asking for information about how many are available on their campuses.
Across the state, books that tackle racial issues such as “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Pérez and “New Kid” by Jerry Craft have been pulled from shelves after parental complaints. Leander ISD removed six books in the spring, including “In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado, which depicts an abusive same-sex relationship with descriptions of sex.
Groups of Texas parents, often sharing information on Facebook groups, have mobilized to find books they deem inappropriate and have them banned from the schools.
The drama has unfolded against the backdrop of a national debate over critical race theory, an academic discipline that holds that racism is embedded in the country’s legal and structural systems. However, the label has been used by some Republicans to target a broader concern that kids are being indoctrinated by progressive teachings in schools.
Texas lawmakers passed two laws this year, that they labeled anti-critical race theory, to crack down on how teachers can talk about race in the classroom. And the issue has been in play up and down the ballot — and outside of Texas, including a GOP victory for the next Virginia governor, who campaigned on a pledge to ban the teaching of critical race theory.
The book
The graphic novel “Gender Queer” traces Kobabe’s own experiences growing up, as the author, whose pronouns are e/em/eir, struggled to identify as gay, bisexual or asexual.
While there are illustrations of sexual content in the novel, Kobabe said that students need “good, accurate, safe information about these topics” instead of “wildly having to search online” and potentially stumble across misinformation.
Kobabe, who recommends the book to high school students or older, said there are other novels that have been in high school libraries for years about sexuality, relationships or identity.
Kobabe believes “Gender Queer” in particular became a flashpoint because it is an illustrated comic instead of just text, and that it would not have been singled out so quickly had it been released before the era of social media.
Parents like May say their opposition to the novel isn’t about the LGBTQ community. It’s about whether these materials and images are appropriate for children. “The only reason is because they are sexually explicit for minors,” May said.
The parents
When May, a stay-athome parent, saw the illustrations from Kobabe’s book, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She said she and her family moved from California to the more conservative Texas about two years ago so she was shocked to see the “leftism and progressivism” in Texas schools. They landed at Keller ISD, which is a middle-class, majority white district north of Fort Worth with about 35,000 students.
Within minutes of hearing from a parent who shared images from the book with a private Facebook group, administrators removed it “out of an abundance of caution,” Keller ISD officials said. The district had one copy of the book in a high school library. It was removed “pending an investigation to determine how the book was selected and ultimately made available to students.” Keller ISD officials declined to name which school had the book.
But the Keller ISD parents didn’t stumble upon the book by happenstance. They were on the hunt.
The Tarrant County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit organization aiming to support parental rights in education, had shared a list of books they identified as problem literature. Keller ISD parents took that list and started combing through their own school library databases to find matches.
Kobabe’s book wasn’t on the Tarrant County group’s list, but it popped up as parents searched key words for titles with words like “gender” and “queer.”
The group of North Texas parents first started their efforts in September to expunge what they’ve deemed “pornographic” material in Keller ISD after they found out the district had copies of “Out of Darkness,” an interracial love story.
May said the group initially became worried about “Out of Darkness” after an article surfaced in their Facebook group about a Lake Travis Independent School District parent who furiously confronted their school board about it, saying it promoted anal sex.
The parents have asked for the book to be removed.
Pérez, 37, an El Paso author who wrote “Out of Darkness,” said there is no depiction of the sex act in her book.
The passage the parent was angry about was a reference to a female character being sexually harassed verbally by another character. The book itself is a love story between a Mexican American girl from San Antonio and an African American boy against the backdrop of a deadly natural gas leak explosion in 1937 in New London.
“One of (the book’s) functions is to make us uncomfortable and I think that I’m really alarmed by the notion that discomfort is dangerous because, frankly, I think we should be uncomfortable about aspects of our history,” she said.
Pérez said the problem she has with this movement to remove books from schools is that parents already can specify to teachers and administrators that they don’t want their children to read certain books — without having to ban it for all kids.