My keynote speech for ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom Awards 2021

Hello! First, congratulations to all the winners, I’m so grateful that you’re out there doing this work. It’s an honor to be invited, but it still feels strange to speak at an ALA event as an author, let alone a “banned author,” because I’ve spent most of my career on the other sides of the equation. And I know that I wasn’t asked to speak to you as a librarian, because a) I’m not one anymore and b) you all mostly are. But my entire adult life has been books, and helping people connect with them in one way or another, so it’s hard to untangle one of these experiences from the others.

And I am sorry, but I do want to start by telling you about something that happened in September of 2012. I was extremely new to my job as a librarian--a solo librarian, at a private school, in downtown Manhattan--when two moms marched through the door, each of them dangling a Captain Underpants book from their fingers like it was a bag of dog poop. They asked me--well, informed me--that their children, first-graders at the time, would not be checking books like that out in the future.

Like I said, I was new to the job, new to the profession, relatively young and all alone in the library and also anxious about standing up to wealthy, entitled parents. I’m embarrassed to say that I rolled over in that moment, and said something like “Oh yes of course right sorry.” But I promise that I spent the next eight years remembering how I failed my students in that moment, and that was the first and last time I let myself be steamrolled that way. I slowly but steadily learned how to respond to that kind of feedback in a way that respected the parent’s opinions but didn’t infringe on my young patrons’ rights.

A few years later I received my first and only formal challenge. A Robie Harris title, of course, hi Robie, because a mom claimed that her daughter was traumatized after learning the names of her body parts, and discovering what might happen to her during puberty. The child was so traumatized by this information that she looked for it in multiple titles, many times, all year, during her class’s checkout time. Even with a collection policy in my favor and an open-minded administration, it was still one of the most stressful, anxiety-inducing periods of my career.

But I promise that I remember that you’re not here to listen to me talk about being a librarian. You’re librarians! With similar stories! A lot of you have probably had far more harrowing experiences of censorship, challenges, unsupportive administrations, and the resulting chilling effects those elements have on your ability to do your job. I was asked to talk to you today as a recently-banned author.

The thumbnail version of what happened, for those who don’t know, is that first a young trans child in Utah brought a copy of my early reader “Call Me Max” to school and asked his teacher to read it. She did, and it sparked a tremendous controversy in the district about the appropriateness of a book written for first or second graders being read to third graders. Not surprisingly, their fears then targeted something called “Equity Book Bundles” and the idea that their children might learn about race and racism.

About a month later a similar situation developed in Austin, Texas. A fourth-grade teacher read “Call Me Max” aloud, and in the resulting hullabaloo an administrator sent a letter to every parent in the district, apologizing for the incident, assuring them that no other children had been “exposed” to the material, and promising that counselors had been dispatched to help children process the experience of reading an extremely basic and anodyne trans 101 early reader.

It was a very stressful experience. But despite getting some threatening emails and Twitter messages, and finding an Amazon review for “Call Me Max” that calls me a pedophile, being the author in this situation is far easier, for me at least, than being the librarian or teacher. I wasn’t worried about getting fired, because I don’t have a job. I didn’t have angry parents storming into my living room. I got support and sympathy from friends, family, a lot of strangers, and Chelsea Clinton, but the challenge I fielded in my library was something I had to struggle through mostly alone.

But both experiences made me think, a lot, about the idea of censorship. Whose name it’s committed in, for what reasons, and under what justifications.

And--I’m sorry to go back to my library, but I spent a long time there--it made me think of my own role as censor. And how I would have felt if my choices as a librarian had been met with such scrutiny.

For example: before my first school year started, I went through the collection and pulled every picture book I could find where an animal or child wore a stereotypical “Indian” feather strapped to their head. I firmly believe that such depictions are dehumanizing, part and parcel of the larger white project of anti-Indigenous oppression, and while I was fed a steady diet of racist books as a child I did not want to inflict that upon my students. In the winter of 2014 I weeded almost every book in the collection about the police, because in children’s literature, nonfiction about the police always presents them as community helpers who keep good people safe, and that is inaccurate.

Like I said, I was the only librarian, without any real supervision, so no one knew what I was doing with the collection. I replaced the “feather” books with all the titles I could find by Indigenous authors. I tried to find books that provided a more thorough view of the police, but couldn’t find any, so kept two on the shelf. Some of you may be wondering about the Horton in the room; there was still plenty of Dr. Seuss on the shelf, but I always did a unit on him with the third and fourth graders where we talked about his anti-Asian political cartoons, putting his work in larger context and leaving them with more questions than answers.

So you could say that I’ve been banned, refused to ban, and have banned. And I’ve been wondering, uncomfortably, if I, and many of my colleagues, use the word “censorship” when we’re describing choices we disagree with, and “curation” or “weeding” or “collection management” to describe actions we believe are right, and if the line between those two is not as bright as one might hope.

Here are some disquieting similarities between me and the people who would keep my books from finding readers:

We care deeply about children, both the ones in our lives and the ones we don’t know.

We believe that the books children read can have significant impacts on their development, in both positive and negative ways.

We want them to learn about topics that we think are important.

We don’t want them to come across images or ideas that we think are damaging.

There are probably many other similarities between us, but these are some important ones.

Now, I haven’t forgotten that this is a celebration of the intellectual freedom awards. And you could be forgiven for thinking that I am using this opportunity to promote some sort of “both sides” argument, or rehash interrogations of moral relativism, or provide some cautionary tale about slippery slopes and how it’s hard to know who is right in these sorts of situations.

But at the risk of unduly influencing your intellectual freedom, I will tell you that I believe that, in these instances, I am right, and that some people are wrong.

Children should be allowed to learn about their bodies, and what will happen to their bodies as they get older. Some people are trans, and that is a perfectly fine subject for children to learn about. It is wrong to remove children’s books about LGBTQ people from a children’s library, and it is right to fight back against any attempts to do so.

I also believe that I am correct in my conviction that blithely giving children books where other human beings are depicted as exotic, or extinct subjects of the distant past, or an animalistic dress-up opportunity, is a bad practice! I know that other people might think it’s okay for children to have some unexamined exposure to racism, whether backgrounded or foregrounded, and that there is plenty of time in their development to undo early prejudices or trauma. I think that approach is misguided, and I want to have no part in it. I do not have longitudinal studies to back up my belief, but I don’t know of studies that contradict it. But I wish that I had been given less as a child to unlearn as an adult.

It might seem strange to use a celebration of intellectual freedom to tell you that I think I’m right and that other people are wrong. Like a blunt tool, a battering ram of exposition rather than the more delicate scalpel of persuasion. But I have also started to consider the idea that the accusation of censorship is itself a similarly blunt tool, one that can knock down closed doors as well as load-bearing walls. That it is a weapon that can be deployed by anyone, toward any end, and in the scramble to defend against it you just might end up blocking your own path forward.

So, while I do believe that I am right about a lot of things, I will not try and convince you of that in this speech--I only got ten minutes to talk, after all. But I would like you to make an honest reckoning of your own beliefs, and to notice how, when, and where you put them into practice. What do you think is right? What do you think is wrong? In what ways are your choices in support of your beliefs, and in what ways are they in opposition? When is it important to be unbiased (if such a thing exists, which it does not), and when are the stakes simply too high to allow for an equal representation of views? When is it acceptable to waver, and when must you stand firm? I know where my lines are. And I encourage you to determine where yours are as well, before you are asked to cross them. Thank you.