EVEN BEFORE Donald Trump entered his second term in office, there was a resurgence of censorship in progress in public schools and libraries across the United States in the form of book-banning initiatives. Restricting public access to literature is not a new practice, nor is it unique to this administration or this nation. Throughout recorded history, literature that confronted uncomfortable truths or raised people’s awareness of human rights abuses has often been met with hostility.
During the U.S. Civil Rights movement, books such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird faced challenges from school boards for bringing attention to racism as well as for their “obscene” content. During the Jim Crow era, organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy—a neo-Confederate movement—worked to ban schoolbooks that portrayed the Confederacy unsympathetically. They sought to enforce the “Lost Cause” ideology that framed the Civil War as a fight for states’ rights rather than the preservation of slavery. Some books, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, are still commonly challenged in schools despite their impact on civil rights education. The most recent wave of book bans serves a similar mission of reducing discourse surrounding marginalized communities.
The rhetoric used to justify these bans often centers on ideas such as “parental rights,” “age-appropriateness,” “religious values,” or preventing children from being exposed to “inappropriate” content. This form of censorship, portrayed by its advocates as an effort to protect children, is really about protecting a social order that often leaves queer people out of the picture. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, groups that support book bans—notably Moms for Liberty, the national clearinghouse for these state and local initiatives—frame LGBT books as a threat to “family values,” mimicking strategies historically used to justify suppressing Civil Rights-era literature that promoted racial justice.
In 2024, according to the nonprofit organization PEN America, which promotes free expression in literature, around one- fourth of the bans on books directly affected the LGBT community. A PEN America report states that the uptick in book bans began in 2021, coinciding with the aftermath of the widespread push for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and by conservatives’ reaction to the election of Joe Biden.
These bans evoke disturbing historical parallels. Authoritarian regimes have long used censorship to repress ideas deemed dangerous to their political agenda. In Nazi Germany, efforts to control cultural life culminated in a 1935 order stating that literature must be kept “pure from all harmful and undesirable [content]… to protect the youth from corrupting influences,” including books containing information about gender and sexuality, Communism, and democracy. The parallels between past attempts to destroy “anti-German” literature and current efforts to target “anti-American” works are striking and represent a familiar pattern of repressing information or ideas that diverge from a preferred ideology.
At the forefront of the modern U.S. book-banning movement are groups like No Left Turn in Education and the Heritage Foundation, which have created extensive blacklists of titles to be targeted, the majority of which feature LGBT material. Such groups are active in dozens of states, including Republican-led Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, and Tennessee. The 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, often called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, enacted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits the teaching or discussion of sexual orientation in the classroom from kindergarten through eighth grade. After its passage, Florida school libraries were instructed to pull hundreds of books from their shelves. These titles include Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo, which explores women-loving women and representations of drag during the Red Scare, and And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins raising a chick together. Other frequently challenged titles include Melissa, by Alex Gino, The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, and This Book Is Gay, by Juno Dawson. All of these books, which are intended for young adult readers, give voice to marginalized communities, and all have drawn scrutiny from conservatives for their representation of diverse genders, races, and sexualities.
The titles being challenged are often critically acclaimed and award-winning books. Take Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe, a memoir of the author’s self-discovery of an existence outside of the gender binary that received an award from the American Library Association; or All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson, which explores growing up Black and queer in America and was included on several lists of the best young adult books of 2020. Both were discussed during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on book-banning in September 2023. Chaired by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the hearing brought national attention to the escalating trend of censorship in schools and libraries. In most cases, what’s “objectionable” in these books is no more explicit than what’s found, and tolerated, in stories about heterosexual characters aimed at the same age group. Students, educators, and state officials testified about how bans on books—especially those dealing with race, gender, and LGBT themes—pose a direct threat to personal freedom.
In Texas, the state legislature has passed legislation restricting classroom content, and districts like the Keller Independent School District have removed dozens of books from their school libraries or curricula, including Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue. In South Carolina, school officials pulled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds, after complaints that it promoted critical race theory. The 20th-century classic The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, has frequently been targeted, often due to its depiction of racialized violence and trauma. While these portrayals are vital to Morrison’s examination of systemic discrimination, censors argued that the material is inappropriate for students, despite its accurate reflection of historical realities—similar to the ways in which queer texts are often targeted for bringing attention to discrimination against queer and trans people.
In some districts, librarians have been threatened with termination or even felony charges for distributing unapproved materials. In 2022, school librarians in Missouri scrambled to comply with SB 775, a law that criminalizes the distribution of “explicit sexual material” to students—language left intentionally vague to allow everything from classic literature to contemporary queer fiction to be included.
The efforts to restrict content, and thus ideas, extend from the page to the computer screen. Shortly after Trump began his first term, his administration began scrubbing federal websites of references to the LGBT community, and in his current term, the administration is picking up where it left off. In 2017, the White House website, which under Obama had hosted a dedicated page on LGBT civil rights, removed the page entirely within hours of Trump’s inauguration. Soon thereafter, the Department of Health and Human Services followed suit, eliminating information on health services for LGBT Americans, including resources for transgender people seeking gender-affirming care. The State Department also deleted content related to marriage equality for people going abroad and guidance for LGBT travelers. The same form of erasure has returned now that Trump is back in the Oval Office. Reuters reported that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is removing content related to “gender ideology extremism” and has taken down statistics on HIV testing and data on health disparities among LGBT youth.
The administration’s strategic censorship during both of his terms has set a precedent that’s operating at the local level. The erasure of diverse literature can have real consequences. According to the Trevor Project’s survey on LGBT mental health in 2023, 45 percent of young people have seriously considered suicide. For transgender and nonbinary youth, that number soars even higher—54 percent. But when LGBT youth are supported by their environments, including having access to inclusive media, their risk of self-harm and suicide drops.
But resistance to these efforts is growing across the country. Teachers, librarians, students, authors, and readers are speaking out—both to their local school boards and at meetings with a wider reach, such as the Senate hearing previously mentioned. In school districts where titles have been pulled, students have staged walkouts, spoken at board meetings, distributed banned books to one another, and formed book clubs in protest.
These efforts are often grassroots, driven by local advocates and supported by independent bookstores, libraries, and nonprofits, all of which are stepping in to promote what the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers call “the freedom to read.” Programs like the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative, which offers free digital library cards to teens nationwide, are helping young people bypass bans. Now, some states—primarily those led by Democrats—are pushing back on restrictions at the legislative level. In Illinois and New Jersey, laws have been passed to prohibit book bans based solely on sexual or gender identity, with other states beginning to follow suit.
Harvard University has also begun to resist President Trump and the right’s attempts to infiltrate education. On the pretext that it was acting to combat anti-Semitism at Harvard—where many students had exercised their right to protest in support of Palestine—the administration issued a set of outrageous demands that included interference in hiring practices and classroom content. Harvard refused. In a letter to the government, President Alan Garber wrote: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Garber’s statement came after the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and Harvard’s refusal to comply with major changes to higher education pushed by the federal government—including audits that promote “viewpoint diversity” and overhauling the admissions and hiring process. In response to Harvard’s refusal, the administration acted to freeze federal funding to Harvard and threatened to end its tax-exempt status.
The Trump administration’s attack on Harvard is part of a broader conservative effort to limit access to accurate information about the nation’s history. This effort encompasses not only schools and universities, but also public institutions such as museums and national historic sites. They have tried to strip the Smithsonian Institution of any content deemed “anti-American”—including representations of slavery, internment camps, and colonization—in an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In that order, Trump claims the Smithsonian offers revisionist history that depicts America as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” The order also says that “the forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes [i.e., trans women] participating in women’s sports” and, in essence, attempts to remove transgender accomplishments from history. Trump’s goal, as outlined in the executive order, is to eliminate exhibits that contradict his white, heteronormative image of American history, thus depriving visitors of the opportunity to learn from the past, including its dark side, marked by racism and homophobia.
Other federally funded institutions have been affected by cuts to DEI and by Trump’s executive orders. The National Park Service has removed references to transgender people from its public materials. Updates to the Stonewall National Monument’s website—a site commemorating the 1969 uprising against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a historic gay bar—eliminated mentions of transgender activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. On the website, the abbreviation itself was altered to have the “T” and “Q” in “lgbtq+” removed, narrowing it down to “LGB” heritage. These changes align with broader federal initiatives, such as an Executive Order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” This order mandated a restrictive binary definition of sex and systematically erased gender-diverse identities from official recognition. Advocacy groups have criticized these revisions, arguing that they represent a deliberate distortion of historical memory intended to reduce queer achievements.
Efforts of resistance, while still limited, are expanding as more people (such as readers of this article) become aware of what is taking place. These efforts show a growing realization that the removal of inclusive literature is both a First Amendment issue and a human rights issue.
Gianna Holiday recently completed a master’s degree in English literature at the Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte, where her research focused on queer theory, censorship, and the cultural politics of education.
