The Katy Independent School District in Southwest Texas, near Houston, is nothing if not ambitious. This January alone, it banned 142 books with LGBTQ+ themes. The district claims it had no choice.
“Library materials with links to prohibited content must be removed from campus library and classroom collections to remain in compliance with Senate Bill 12 and Senate Bill 13,” the district declares on its website. SB 12 forbids Texas schools from teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation, among other things. And SB 13 requires school districts to set their own rules for library materials while imposing a blanket ban on “indecent content or profane content.”
Both bills were signed into law last year by Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, as part of an ongoing national wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Both bills have drawn Constitutional challenges. In February, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking key aspects of SB 12. But the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided not to hear a challenge of a Texas law similar to SB 13 that upholds the ability of school districts to remove books from school libraries on grounds that such removals are an exercise of “government speech.”
The Katy Independent School District insisted it is just “committed to providing safe learning environments for all students.” But Anne Russey, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, had a different take: “As evidenced by the latest purge of 140 LGBTQ+ library books, Katy ISD continues to restrict and remove library books based on the viewpoints, ideas, and identities they portray and contain,” Russey told the Houston Chronicle.
This is not Katy’s first foray into the role of book police. In 2023, the district halted all new library book acquisitions and placed all recent acquisitions in storage after a single school board member, Morgan Calhoun, sounded an alarm about books she purported to have seen in elementary schools that “support sexually alternative lifestyles.”
Calhoun, one of three board members who had just been elected with the help of a conservative political action committee, ironically named Texans for Educational Freedom, later revealed that her main concern was a book about a pink kitten who wants to be a unicorn. Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn, a book for four-to-seven-year-olds written by Shannon Hale and illustrated by LeUyen Pham, both prior Caldecott and Newbery award winners, makes no mention of sexuality or gender identity.
In a post Russey shared on X, Calhoun tartly said that the book’s feline protagonist “does want to transform into something they are obviously not.” She also accused the book of referring to a single character as “they” instead of “he or she,” which it does not do. As Russey pointed out, “The only time the author refers to any character as ‘they’ is when she is referring to multiple characters and she only refers to the kitty who wants to become a unicorn as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ ” Indeed, it is Calhoun who committed this perceived offense, by saying “they are obviously not.” Tsk tsk.
Across the nation, banning books from public schools is all the rage. According to the free speech group PEN America, almost 7,000 book bans yanked nearly 4,000 unique titles from public schools during the 2024-2025 school year, following the banning of more than 10,000 books the previous year. Books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes accounted for about 25 percent of the reject pile. Commonly banned LGBTQ+ titles include All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, and Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag by Rob Sanders.
Another book to run afoul of the censors is And Tango Makes Three, written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell with art by Henry Cole. The book, which contains not a single mention of sexuality, is based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together. The authors sued one Florida school district that pulled the book from its library shelves. That case is still playing out in the courts.
The crackdown on books for children and young adults that make even passing reference to sexual orientation or gender expression has made publishers more reluctant to accept them, according to a recent article in The Hill. “This is the first year in, like, a decade that I’ve had [rejection] responses from editors specifically citing that it’s difficult to place queer books in stores, and they’re being selective about acquiring queer stories,” author and literary agent Rebecca Podos told the news outlet.
Such capitulation is deeply disappointing—especially because when people stand up to book banners, they often win.
In 2024, six major book publishers—HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks—sued the state of Florida over its law allowing any person to force the removal of any school library book simply by alleging it involves “sexual conduct.” The law had been signed the year before by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, as part of a package of transphobic bills, about which he crowed, “As the world goes mad, Florida represents a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy.” Not quite.
The ban, the publishers noted, had led to the removal of “thousands of historic and modern classics . . . being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves.” Among them: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Forever by Judy Blume.
“Fighting unconstitutional legislation in Florida and across the country is an urgent priority,” proclaimed the publishers. “We are unwavering in our support for educators, librarians, students, authors, readers—everyone deserves access to books and stories that show different perspectives and viewpoints.”
Last August, Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida issued a sweeping ruling in the publishers’ favor, deeming the law unconstitutionally overbroad. The judge decreed that only books determined to be “harmful to minors” can be removed. He also said school officials must evaluate a book in its entirety rather than banning it based on a single page or passage. The ruling opened the way to hundreds of banned titles being returned to the shelves.
The truth is, most Americans don’t want politicians or even school administrators second-guessing the decisions of school librarians as to which books are appropriate for children and young adults. A 2025 statewide poll in Michigan found that 75 percent of respondents trust librarians to make decisions about what books are available to what age groups, while just 4 percent “blame libraries for children accessing objectionable content.”
Early last year, the Alabama Public Library Service paused $40,000 in funding to Fairhope Public Library after anti-LGBTQ+ activist groups complained that it was not banning enough books; local residents responded with a fundraiser that pulled in at least $46,000. “I don’t like the fact that anyone can go to Montgomery and make some comments and cause a pause in funding without further investigation,” remarked Jack Burrell, a Fairhope city councilmember.
In November, the Alabama board barred all materials that discuss “transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders” from state public libraries’ children’s and young adult sections. Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. Senator now running to become Alabama’s next governor, has vowed to “get rid of a few people on that library board” and replace them with “people with some common sense and not some crazy political agenda.” Jones said he understood concerns about library materials being age-appropriate but felt those concerns “can be remedied without removing them. Those things can be fixed without trying to ban books.”
Former state library board chair John Wahl, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, had a different take, which he offered in response: “This just shows the far-left, Biden-loving, liberal elitist mentality Doug Jones stands for. He actually believes that exposing young children to transgender story hour and pushing books filled with sexually explicit passages and graphic images is normal. It’s not. It’s perversion.”
This is what defenders of libraries and librarians are up against: impassioned anger over things that are not actually happening. In fact, providing students with age-appropriate books that deal with gender identity and sexual orientation is the right thing to do. As PEN America has expressed: “All students deserve to see themselves in every kind of story, from the pages of an elementary school picture book to those of a high school’s history textbook. LGBTQ+ expression is free expression.”
It’s not the books that are putting kids in danger. It’s book banners.