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.
More than half of the LGBTQ+ parents surveyed considered leaving Florida because of its so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, according to a new study, and the vast majority—nearly 90 percent—are worried about its effect on their children and family.
One last roundup before 2022 winds to a close! Here are some of the stories of LGBTQ parents and our kids that I haven’t covered already.
What were the major advances—and setbacks—for LGBTQ families in 2022? I asked several leading experts to share their thoughts, and all agreed there had been many obstacles—but also reasons for hope.
Like many in the LGBTQ community, I am still grieving over those murdered at Club Q in Colorado Springs last month. I am also thinking about how much anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has created a climate in which such violence can germinate, and how much a purported concern over children’s well-being has played into that rhetoric. We need to reclaim the narrative of what it means to think of the children.
