Last October, Brevard Public Schools, which educates roughly 74,000 students in eastern Florida, removed Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe from its libraries out of concern that the graphic novel featured “adult images that have no place in education.” BPS superintendent Mark Mullin alleged the book “violates [school] guidelines” and encouraged parents to review BPS’s library catalogue, available online. A Florida NBC affiliate devoted roughly 30 seconds to covering the decision; a few local outlets spent around 200 words noting that the book will no longer be available in public schools.
In short, it was a local news story—but one that has the national media increasingly concerned. Mullin was likely following the lead of public schools in Fairfax, Virginia, which had pulled the book from its shelves a month before in response to parent outrage. Since then, roughly a dozen large public school districts have opted not to carry it. That prompted NBC News to give Kobabe’s book the dubious moniker of “one of [the] most-banned” in America. And recently, the New York Times ran a story—headlined “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.”—alleging that a reactionary war on “more diverse books” such as Gender Queer could eventually endanger the availability of “towering canonical works.”
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