This week in “queer parents being awesome” is the news that author, professor, transgender advocate, and parent Jennifer Finney Boylan has been named president and chair of PEN America, the century-old organization dedicated to defending writers and free expression.
This week marks Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) annual event highlighting the value of the freedom to read and drawing attention to the harms of censorship. With record numbers of bans across the country, the need for such awareness is greater than ever. But I’m also here to remind us: It’s about more than just the books.
Non-profit Pride and Less Prejudice, which has donated over 10,000 LGBTQ-inclusive picture books to elementary school classrooms since 2019, is holding a virtual auction through this weekend so they can send 1,200 more. Check out some of the amazing offerings!
A new study looks at parents’ perceptions of public libraries and the current issues they face, including book bans and how people feel about children’s books that touch on sometimes sensitive topics: LGBTQ+ characters, race/racism, social justice, and sexual education.
A Florida school district in July ordered its librarians to remove all books with LGBTQ characters or themes from classrooms and libraries. While the district later asserted that such books are still allowed in high school libraries, there is evidence that many have been removed from them as well.
The parenting news keeps coming! Here are some stories I haven’t covered separately. This edition is full of international news (and a few U.S. items), so read on and catch up with what’s happening around the world.
A memoir about growing up nonbinary and asexual has once again topped the American Library Association’s annual list of the most challenged books—and new data shows that in a year of record censorship attempts, the “vast majority” targeted books with LGBTQIA+ and/or BIPOC characters.
The Florida Board of Education has agreed to expand the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay/LGBTQ” law to all K-12 grades.
A Florida legislator has introduced a bill that would expand the state’s “Don’t Say Gay/LGBTQ” law to completely ban instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity from pre-K through eighth grade classrooms and ban the use of pronouns and names aligned with transgender and nonbinary students’ gender identities in schools.
The most-banned picture books in schools during the 2021-22 academic year feature LGBTQ and/or people of color protagonists, according to a new list from PEN America. That’s sadly unsurprising. Let’s look a little more closely at what we can learn from this, however.
