Library Board Dissolved Over One Trans Book
Two months after a library board of trustees voted to keep one book featuring a transgender boy, out of 20,000 books in the library’s catalogue, the board was dissolved without any replacement.
by Aly Gibbs
On October 9, in North Carolina, the Randolph County Library’s Board of Trustees met to discuss a book that had been reported for removal or relocation. One book out of 20,000, Call Me Max by Kyle Lukoff is a children’s story about a young transgender boy navigating a name change at school. It is innocent, it is wholesome, it is informative. Unfortunately, doddering old busybody Dorris Welborne, a grandmother seemingly too addled to discern the content of the books she’s checking out for her grandkids, reported the book to the Board of Trustees after she checked it out and realized it was about disgusting icky trans people, who certainly aren’t welcome in North Carolina.
Thankfully, the board voted 5-2 in favor of keeping Call Me Max right where it was. While two board members called the book part of an “agenda” that is “wrong,” and “inappropriate” for children, others remarked that even relocating a book like that would be a slippery slope, and that nobody should have the right to decide which books can and cannot be read. One trustee even remarked, “To anyone out there that is transgender, it is okay to be transgender in Randolph County.”
Unfortunately, that message has now been firmly stamped out by the Randolph County Board of Commissioners, who voted last week 3-2 to completely dissolve the Board of Trustees without any plans to install a new board.
If you naively believe that proper procedure and the democratic process can save us from these bigots, well… I’ve got bad news for you. There’s always a higher authority, it seems, ready to overturn the will of the people if the people’s decisions aren’t convenient.
Nearly 200 people attended the Board of Commissioners meeting, some of them encouraged to attend by Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition. Fitzgerald said, stupidly, that the book “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is. Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning.”
Here are some fun facts about the shadowy conservative political action committee: They rake in just shy of half a million dollars in donations every year, from unnamed donors, and spend all of that money paying Tami, funding unnamed “programs,” and most mysteriously… “other.” It would be irresponsible of me to baselessly accuse organizations like NCVA, and others that I’ve written at length about in the Trans Data Library, of being shallow fronts for money laundering, so I won’t do that. I would never do that. Do not put in the newspaper that I said that.
Incidentally, this is far from the first time Call Me Max has caused a stir. Lukoff, a transgender man and children’s book author who used to be a librarian himself, has seen his book banned by three school districts to date: Carmel, Indiana; Palm Beach County, Florida; Stillwater, Minnesota. The book has also been banned at the federal level by the Defense Department in military schools, and endured drama in Utah and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Texas.
Of the kerfuffle in North Carolina, Lukoff said, “Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power. If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality.”
It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? That these monstrous dickheads so desperately want us to stop existing at all, that they’re willing to tear down any obstacle that keeps them from pretending we don’t exist and ensuring that trans kids can’t find out about themselves, their identities and their needs in a safe way.
Here’s my advice: If your local library doesn’t carry Call Me Max, consider asking them to. Because I promise you, some kid somewhere desperately needs a book like that in their lives.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
