The campaign against CRT in the schools is expanding to challenge sexual content being provided to kids. To understand this debate, one must see that content.
The campaign against CRT in the classroom is expanding to challenge sexual content being provided to kids. To truly understand this debate, one must see that content.
Warning: This article contains graphic sexual images and language.
W hen asked recently about the growing controversy surrounding her 2019 graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir, cartoonist Maia Kobabe told NBC News: “It’s very hard to hear people say ‘This book is not appropriate to young people’ . . . There are people for whom this is vital and for whom this could maybe even be lifesaving.” Kobabe — a biological woman who identifies as “nonbinary and asexual” and uses the gender-neutral “Spivak” pronouns “e/eim/eir” — frames Gender Queer as an autobiographical account of self-discovery: “Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story,” the book’s official description writes. “It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity — what it means and how to think about it — for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.”
But the graphic novel — which was one of the recipients of the 2020 American Library Association’s Alex Awards, and now sits on the shelves of school libraries across the country — has been the subject of fiery debate in the schools.
It might be easy to see this, and the debate over similar materials, as an overreaction by solicitous helicopter parents — or what one Florida journalist described as “neo-puritan furies . . . stirred up in an age of intense reaction against LGBTQ gains.” But media accounts tend to gloss over the shockingly graphic details that have compelled parents to take a renewed interest in school course materials. One need not be a prude — let alone a bigot — to be disturbed by the content of books like Gender Queer in children’s libraries. By any objective standard, the book’s highly sexualized imagery is not appropriate for children.
With Gender Queer, parents specifically took issue with passages of text and illustrations that could only be described as pornographic. Those passages include scenes of two men having sex, multiple explicit illustrations of minors performing oral sex on one another, and even one drawing depicting a full-grown man masturbating a young boy’s penis. And all that comes on top of maximally graphic text passages outlining a 14-year-old Kobabe’s sexual fantasies.
Adults already know the beauty and value of sex & are thus undisturbed by the ugliness of pornograghy. Kids, however, have no understanding of sex. Pornograghy turns a child's wonder to sadness & cynicism about the adult world waiting for them. That feeling is loss of innocence. pic.twitter.com/OKsbKsdech
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) December 8, 2021
Understandably, the presence of this content in school libraries has provoked outrage among parents. Recent months have seen school districts from Florida to Alaska remove Gender Queer from their shelves in response to community pressure campaigns, even as powerful institutional interests mobilize to defend the presence of the obscene material. These emergent battle lines — which often occur at the school-district level, and apply to elementary and high-school libraries alike — are all too familiar in an era where the public-education system is increasingly at odds with its constituents, pitting parents and their allies in conservative advocacy groups against school boards, teachers’ unions, and a hostile national media that consistently frames curricular objections as racist, homophobic, or otherwise indicative of deep-seated bigotry.
Left-wing apologists for books like Gender Queer have framed the efforts to remove the book from school libraries as an attack on LGBT inclusion. A month after parents in Fairfax County, Va., pushed for a ban on Gender Queer and Lawn Boy — Jonathan Evison’s controversial novel that features highly graphic descriptions of sex among and between fourth-grade boys — the local school board’s review committee unanimously voted to return the books to high-school library shelves, citing their being “diverse reading material that students with underrepresented identities could relate to,” according to the Washington Post. Kobabe has made a similar argument herself, suggesting that parents who objected to her book were “mad . . . because I said nonbinary and trans people exist,” in an October Post guest essay. “Removing or restricting queer books in libraries and schools is like cutting a lifeline for queer youth,” she wrote.
But is the basic desire to protect one’s children from hardcore pornography — whether “queer” or otherwise — really an attack on LGBT students? “This crosses all strata of politics or race or class,” Stacy Langton, a Fairfax mother of six who led the charge against Gender Queer and Lawn Boy, told National Review. “It isn’t political. Unfortunately, it got made political, and I wish that hadn’t happened, because it’s kind of dishonest. It’s like, who’s really in favor of porn in schools?”
Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant
Amid the surge of grassroots resistance to critical race theory in school districts across the country, parental scrutiny of curricular materials has been expanding beyond the initial focus on controversial questions surrounding race and racism. Efforts to ban CRT and texts like the “1619 Project” served as lightning rods for debates over how to teach American history, but progressive sexual and gender ideology is quickly becoming another flash-point in the education wars. And the sources of controversy go well beyond Gender Queer. “I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom, told NBC News in November.
Like the backlash to CRT, the push to remove obscene material from school libraries was supercharged as a result of coronavirus-era remote learning, which gave parents a firsthand look at their children’s learning materials. What blossomed into the potent parent movement that is now sweeping the country started as small networks organized around conversations among concerned mothers and fathers on social media. Langton, whose mother was gay, recalls seeing a YouTube video of a school-board meeting in Texas where a parent was reading “aloud from some of the materials,” she told National Review. “I’m thinking, is this going on in my school? So I asked my son to bring me his school-issued laptop and look up [Gender Queer and Lawn Boy]. And of course, they were there. So we went to the school to check the books out the next day.”
“The thing is, you have to actually see this material with your own eyes and read it in order to perceive how bad it really is,” Langton said. “And that’s what I did. I wasn’t just going to take somebody’s word for it.”
Indeed, in the context of school libraries, it is exceedingly difficult to defend the content of these books on the merits. While Lawn Boy does not feature Gender Queer’s graphic illustrations, it more than makes up for it in explicit sexual language. Evison writes about an experience “in fourth grade at a church group meeting out in the bushes” where “I touched Doug Goble’s d**k, and he touched mine. In fact, there were even some mouths involved.” Later, a character exclaims: “What if I told you I touched another guy’s d**k? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s d**k in my mouth. I was in fourth grade, it was no big deal. He sucked mine too.” Still later, the book details a fantasy about “holding or tugging or sucking d***s. All I could think about while he was chatting me up, was his little salamander between my fourth-grade fingers, rapidly engorging with blood.”
It is no wonder that the materials’ apologists shroud their defenses in euphemisms about free speech, “sex positivity,” and LGBT inclusion. On their own terms, these texts shock. And sunlight is the best disinfectant: “If the general public could be shown this material, there is no debate — it ends the debate,” Langton said.
That approach — showing rather than telling — has been the playbook for the burgeoning anti-obscenity push in American education. In November, revelations about Gender Queer’s ubiquitous presence in school libraries prompted Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas to launch statewide probes into obscenity in schools, vowing to prosecute those who provide such materials to children. The month before saw Virginia Beach Public Schools remove Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, and four other texts from school shelves, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which has been banned in school districts from Utah to Kansas in recent months for multiple detailed scenes involving pedophilia. School libraries in at least eight states have removed George Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue for its long descriptions of gay sex and masturbation among minors. And at least one high school in Las Vegas pulled a book assignment on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, another graphic novel with illustrations of women masturbating and performing oral sex on one another, in September 2020.
Again, the text of these books is the strongest argument against their presence in schools. The Bluest Eye’s most disturbing passage is a detailed description of a man raping his daughter:
He put his head down and nibbled at the back of her leg. His mouth trembled at the firm sweetness of the flesh . . . The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to f*** her — tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear.
And Fun Home’s images are similarly graphic.
Even for adults, passages like these can be difficult to read. For children, Langton said, they are indefensible: “Do you want your twelve-year-old son stumbling across that while they’re looking for Superman?”
Censorship, Right and Wrong
In early August, the Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association filed a lawsuit against Nicole Solas, a stay-at-home mother in the 8,000-odd person town of Wakefield. Like many of the parents who have unwittingly found themselves at the center of the debate over American education in recent months, Solas “would have never planned on this,” she told National Review. “My daughter’s in kindergarten, and I called the school to ask questions about kindergarten. One of my questions was about if they taught critical race and gender theory. And they answered in the affirmative — they said things like, ‘we don’t call kids boys and girls in kindergarten, we don’t use gender terminology.’ They said that they ‘embed the values’ of gender identity in the classroom.”
That admission drove Solas to push for more information about what her daughter was being exposed to in the classroom. When she began to file public-records requests in response to the school’s increasing hostility to her questions, the largest teachers’ union in Rhode Island mobilized an unsuccessful attempt to block the release of public records regarding gender and racial ideology in the school system, citing the need to protect “teachers’ individual privacy rights.” In what is now an all-too-familiar series of events, the Wakefield mother had suddenly found herself in the crosshairs of the state education bureaucracy. “They wanted to ostracize me from my community and send a message that if you ask too many questions, you’ll be ostracized too,” she told National Review.
Solas and parents like her are up against an education system in the grip of a radical cultural ideology with implications beyond the debates over CRT. In an October 15 email that Solas shared with National Review, the superintendent from a neighboring school district defended the presence of Gender Queer in school libraries on the grounds that the book was “a valuable resource for someone who is working through issues of sexual identity and/or identifying as transgender,” and that “the intent of the author is to be concerned for the sexual health of those who are transgender.”
That line of reasoning — the idea that “we need this for gay kids,” as Solas put it — is echoed by school authorities defending obscene material across the country. “I find that to be really humiliating and dehumanizing,” Solas told NR. “Because as far as I can see, it’s only gay pornography in libraries — I don’t see heterosexual pornography being shown to kids. Why do gay kids have to be dehumanized in pornographic images?”
Progressive ideologues in the public-school bureaucracy regularly defend material like Gender Queer and The Bluest Eye in the language of social justice, framing the texts as a way to break “stigma” and include “queer identities” in education. Unsurprisingly, parents who object to graphic material in schools are attacked in the same terms as parents who take issue with radical racial doctrines such as CRT. “I’m accused of being homophobic and a bigot because I don’t want gay porn in schools,” Solas said.
The cultural ideology that sanctions and justifies books like Gender Queer has reached the highest echelons of American life. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described the recent slate of book bans as “an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America, as the campaign against critical race theory expands into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender.” When a school-board member in northern Virginia quipped that he wanted to “throw” sexually explicit books “in a fire,” NPR noted — without a hint of irony — that “book burning was a practice perpetuated in Nazi Germany in order to oppress authors and ideas that were in opposition to Nazi ideology.”
“It’s unbelievably biased,” Solas said of the media coverage. “I mean, it’s just pure propaganda.”
Of course, elite progressive outrage on this issue is selective. When an English professor at UC–Berkeley urged her Twitter followers to “steal Abigail Shrier’s book” (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which provoked outrage for its criticisms of transgender ideology) and “burn it on a pyre,” no Nazi Germany comparisons surfaced in NPR. Michelle Goldberg had nothing to say about the virtue of free speech when Chase Strangio, an attorney for the ACLU — yes, the same ACLU that once defended the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis — said that “stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and [her] ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Nor was there a panicked media frenzy about “censorship” when Ethics and Public Policy Center president Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally was delisted from Amazon for its critiques of gender ideology.
In reality, all the censorship efforts listed above are far more serious than the parent-led efforts to protect children from obscene, sexually graphic content in schools. Pornography’s “whole purpose is . . . to deprive human beings of their specifically human dimension,” as Irving Kristol put it in his famous 1971 essay “Pornography, Obscenity, and The Case for Censorship.” In essence, porn’s coarse public depictions of copulation desacralize human sexuality: “When sex is a public spectacle,” Kristol argued, “a human relationship has been debased into a mere animal connection.” And given that “the desirability of self-government depends on the character of the people who govern,” he continued, the perpetuation of republican virtue required efforts to limit obscenity’s claims to the public square: “If you think pornography and/or obscenity is a serious problem, you have to be for censorship . . . lest there be any misunderstanding as to what I am saying, I will put it as bluntly as possible: If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.”
Intelligent people of good conscience can arrive at a range of different opinions about the role and level of such censorship when it comes to pornographic or obscene content for adults. But there is no comparable arena of reasonable disagreement when it comes to children.