It’s Banned Books Week, and according to PEN America, schools in the United States banned 11,982 books last year. That’s the most bans ever in a single school year, almost twice as many as the year before.
And one of those banned books was mine!
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, War, and the Gulf of America, instructed the armed services to remove books about diversity, equity, and inclusion from libraries at military bases and the service academies. To protect the censors from being contaminated by actually reading the books in question, the Defense Department provided a list of keywords including affirmative action, anti-racism, critical race theory, discrimination, diversity, gender dysphoria, gender identity and transition, transgender and white privilege. A computer search quickly identified the offending texts and removed them from the library catalogues before anyone else could read them.
Just following orders, the Naval Academy pulled almost 400 books from the Nimitz Library, including my book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond he and she (Liveright 2020). My social history of a part of speech would sap the moral fiber of sailors, so out it went.
It’s not just the Pentagon that’s afraid of the printed word. Two conservative-led states, Florida and Texas, were responsible for more than half of the books banned in the United States.
Red states have been censoring higher education as well, targeting books on race, sex, gender, slavery, and climate change. Texas A&M banned books in some 200 courses, even removing Plato’s Symposium from a philosophy course.
You’d think Texas censors would welcome a classical text by a GWP (Great Western – presumably white – Philosopher), but Plato had to go because Aristophanes, one of the characters in the Symposium, claims that the first humans had three genders: men, women, and androgynes, blending male and female. States are banning trans athletes; might as well ban trans Greeks.
Like the Navy, red states are also censoring pronouns. A 2023 Florida law declares, “It is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to that person’s sex” (FL 1000.071). That law further prohibits Florida schools from requiring employees or students to use a “false” pronoun. In addition, an employee may not tell students their own “false” pronoun – a government restriction on voluntary speech. Nor may employees ask a student for their “false” pronoun: “An employee or contractor of a public K-12 educational institution may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.”
Unlike Florida, Utah does not ban pronouns – yet – but current Utah law does prevent a school from changing “a student's gender identity that does not conform with the student's sex” without first obtaining parental consent – and that presumably includes changing student pronouns (State of Utah Code 53E-9-205). Then, in August, 2024, the Utah State Board of Education issued a state-wide ban on thirteen books for violating Utah’s new law requiring the removal of “Objective Sensitive Materials” from Utah’s classrooms and school libraries. Each of the banned books had something to say about sex. Utah law also allows school employees, students, and parents to request the removal of books containing “Subjective Sensitive Materials,” so presumably more bans at both the state and local levels are on the way for Utah (Utah Code 53G-10-103).
Supporting state book bans, in August, 2024, a federal appeals court approved Iowa’s ban on books with sexual content on the grounds that the law was both viewpoint neutral and a legitimate regulation of age-appropriate reading matter. Schools banned thousands of books before the Iowa law was upheld, and now they’re poised to ditch thousands more (GLBT Youth in Iowa Schools Task Force, et al., v. Kimberly Reynolds, et al., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, case no. 24-1075. August 9, 2024).
Libraries, too, continued to fall victim to book bans. When a public library in Llano County, Texas, removed books with racial and sexual themes, a group of patrons sued, claiming that their First Amendment “right to receive information” had been abridged. But a federal appeals court ruled that the Constitution grants no such right. The court found that curating a public library’s collection – deciding which books to buy and which to remove from its shelves – is a form of government speech, and government speech is not subject to the First Amendment (Little v. Llano County, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Case no. 23-50224. May 23, 2025).
A government can say whatever it wants, but in Little v. Llano County, the Appeals Court found that any government official, even one who doesn’t read much and may not even have a library card, can dictate how a professional librarian should shape their library’s collection.
As of this writing, What’s Your Pronoun? remains off-limits at Nimitz, though for some reason it’s still available at West Point. Banning my book didn’t even boost its sales. In the best of times, books about the parts of speech don’t fly off the shelves (assuming they haven't been pulled from the shelves by censors). And even in the worst of times, there's still a way to celebrate Banned Books Week: Read a banned book. Read any book. Books can’t hurt you. Not if you just read them.
Spoiler alert: In this episode of Lewis, titled “The Indelible Stain” (s6e4), someone is murdered with a book: the cause of death is blunt force trauma as a result of being hit on the head with a copy of another literary classic, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. After the arrest, Inspector Lewis (Kevin Whately) invites Sgt. Hathaway (Laurence Fox) out for a pint. But Hathaway demurs, saying he’s got a book to finish. Lewis chides him, “Have you learned nothing from this case? Books are bad for your health.” To which Hathaway replies, “Not if you just read them.” Whatever you think of Laurence Fox’s ultra-conservative politics, the script offers an important corrective to book bans: books won’t hurt you. Not if you just read them.
