LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A Jefferson County Public Schools appeal panel will decide within 60 days whether to pull a controversial graphic novel from the library shelves of two of the district's alternative schools.
Miranda Stovall, a mother and the vice president of No Left Turn in Education's Kentucky chapter, is trying to overturn a decision by leaders at Liberty High School and the Phoenix School of Discovery to keep copies of "Gender Queer: A Memoir" by Maia Kobabe in libraries at those schools.
Neither alternative school has a site-based decision making council, so the district's four-member SBDM Appeals Board will consider Stovall's challenge.
The hourlong public hearing Thursday drew an audience of more than 60 people to the VanHoose Education Center. Most of them backed pulling the memoir by Kobabe — who is nonbinary and asexual — from the schools' libraries.
"As a mother of four, I believe the JCPS decision-makers should aid in the process of protecting children from obscene, pornographic content regardless of a child's sexual identity or orientation, especially without parental knowledge or consent," Stovall said in her opening remarks
"Gender Queer: A Memoir" has been a flashpoint for censorship in schools and libraries throughout the U.S. The American Library Association, which awarded the graphic novel an Alex Award in 2020 as a book written for adults with "special appeal" to young adult audiences, listed the title as the most challenged work in public libraries, schools and universities in 2021 based on its tracking of literary disputes.
The ALA said "Gender Queer: A Memoir" was banned, challenged and restricted for LGBTQ content and because of sexually explicit imagery. Lynn Reynolds, executive director of library media services for JCPS, said all books challenged in JCPS libraries dealt with LGBTQ or racial subjects.
"Gender Queer: A Memoir" (Photo courtesy of amazon.com)
Clint Elliott, Stovall's attorney, said the graphic novel should be considered pornography under Kentucky law.
"It's just pure sexual content on display for what purpose?" Elliott said in response to a question from the panel on how graphic material in "Gender Queer: A Memoir" differed from sexually charged content found in other titles like "Romeo and Juliet," "The Scarlet Letter" and "The Giver."
But Reynolds disagreed. She told the appeals board that the work held literary value and presented LGBTQ themes absent from other works of literature.
"It appeals to a lot of students," she said. "... The book impacts the reader and society as a whole. 'Gender Queer' impacts readers and allows them to be humanized, those that are marginalized. When books explore ideological and literary elements, educators are better equipped to lead social and cultural conversations. It disrupts norms and it allows them to examine texts for different conceptualizations."
Banning "Gender Queer: A Memoir" from JCPS school libraries and preventing access for students "restricts and is a threat to freedom of speech and choice," Reynolds said.
"I deny that as an educator," she said. "If we do not give our children, our students, our leaders the opportunity to have access to other ideas that are not popular to one group of people, we are doing our children, our students, our communities and our society a disservice."
The controversy surrounding whether JCPS schools should pull "Gender Queer: A Memoir" from library shelves has drawn attention from Lindsey Tichenor, the Republican nominee and the only candidate on the Nov. 8 ballot for the 6th Senate District that covers Oldham and Trimble counties and includes a portion of northeast Jefferson County.
She hopes to see the General Assembly take on sexually graphic material in school libraries and she's not optimistic the JCPS appeals board will overturn decisions by Liberty High and Phoenix School of Discovery leadership teams to keep "Gender Queer: A Memoir" on their shelves.
"I think parents are starting to come to the realization that things are being offered to our students in a public school setting that are not appropriate," Tichenor said. "And as this book and other books are being exposed, we're speaking out against it, because no child should be given an opportunity to view pornography in their school setting."
The appeals board said it would render a decision within 60 days of Thursday's hearing.
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