How it feels to be a minority targeted by book banners

I am autistic. I am transgender. I fall in love with all kinds of people and don’t want to sleep with any of them. I have collected L, G, B, T and Q. And even though none of these things have any direct impact on them, some people are upset about this.

Anyone paying attention knows that book challenges have climbed astronomically in the last few years. I wrote an essay on how the ALA’s OIT needs to step up and better track them. Emily Knox has some great insights into their motivations in her book Book Banning in 21st Century America. There are many reasons that books are challenged, but in recent history, there are two primary motivations: authorship by and discussion of the experiences of Black and brown people, and authorship and discussion of the experiences of queer people. I am white, I recognize that I am privileged, and cannot speak to the experiences of BIPOC folks directly. Instead I would center their voices, and Dr. Knox is a great starting point to learn more on that front.

But I am queer, among other marginalized identities. I have experienced discrimination within education and employment. I’ve experienced harassment and violence for being visibly queer in public while minding my own business. And I came to understand many aspects of my identity as an adult, because growing up the people who raised me were careful to shield me from what these challengers consider dangerous. I was taught that sex and gender were the same, that heteroromantic relationships were the only ones possible, and that all such relationships must include procreative sex. My access to books and television was limited to protect me. All of the role models I had were cisgender and heterosexual. I didn’t know that people could be non-straight until my last year of high school, and I didn’t know people could be non-cis until my last year of university.

I spent over 20 years of my life believing that I was alone in my experience (or lackthereof) of sexual and romantic attraction and gender.

Isolation is a terrible thing. Even in our unjust prison system, we have regulations on solitary confinement because of the damage it can do to a person. In my case, that feeling of isolation, that relentless pressure from my social group to conform to cishetnormative ideas of how a person should be, left me feeling so hopeless and alone that I attempted to end my life at age 8.

Now I know that there are people out there like me. I am so glad that I lived long enough to understand that! And especially over the last few years, there have been so many people coming out and being honest and proud of who they are. It’s been amazing to see this renaissance of genuine joy in our existence, our diversity. And I am so thankful that the children in my life can look around and see that around them, so that if they are some flavor of queer, they’ll know they’re not alone. And that they’re exactly who they’re supposed to be, and that’s okay.

So what does it feel like to be a queer person living in a time of unprecedented challenges to books who feature LGBTQ+ characters? How does it feel to have my own writing as a queer person, even when writing things unrelated to gender or orientation at all, prompt death threats from these groups? It’s awful for me, certainly. It is horrific to have people wish such horrible things for me just because of who I am and how I love. But the most cruel part of that experience, for me, is the knowledge that they’re doing this on behalf of children, to “protect” them. Being protected from exposure to queer literature and media didn’t keep me from becoming queer; it made me suicidal. My heart breaks for all of the children who would end up like I was back at 8 years old.

The science is clear: embracing children for who they truly are lowers rates of self-harm and suicide. Exposing children to media with a diverse cast of characters lowers rates of self-harm and suicide even among cishet kids, and improve empathy and decreases violence to boot. So, the next time someone claims to be banning books to “protect” children, ask them exactly what it is they’re being protected from.