My work is among 850 inclusive titles a Texas lawmaker wants out of school libraries. And what a surprise, 62% are LGBTQ+
It’s becoming worryingly frequent for me to get emails from librarians telling me that one of my books has been “challenged”. Recently, two of my titles – This Book Is Gay and Understanding Gender – appeared on a very long list of books that the Texas lawmaker Matt Krause would like to see removed from schools. I’m in good company: Margaret Atwood, the young adult bestseller Adam Silvera, and the V for Vendetta author Alan Moore also feature, alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeffrey Eugenides and – for whatever reason – a book by James Patterson.
Book “banning” is nothing new. Few sights are more enduring, or chilling, than the photographs of Nazi youth raiding Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in 1933 and burning the books they found there. Book burning remains synonymous with censorship, dictatorship and autocracy. As a writer, I think it’s up to publishers to decide if they want their name associated with prejudice – even with authors and books I disagree with fundamentally on ideological grounds. But this isn’t indicative of some evenly split “culture war”. Krause only wants liberal, or inclusive, books banned.
Juno Dawson is the author of Stay Another Day
