American parents have been fighting for books to be removed from schools that are deemed "age-inappropriate" and "pornographic."
In 5,000 schools, more than 1,600 books were removed during the 2021-22 school year, according to NBC News. The two most common books are "Gender Queer: A Memoir" and "All Boys Aren't Blue," which contain images of masturbation and sexual encounters.
"Parents across the country have organically risen to fight the obviously age-inappropriate material that has crept into public schools," Brooke Stephens, a member of Utah Parents United, a group founded on parental rights in education, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "Once they see it, they know it's wrong, and they won't give up until it's gone."
"Gender Queer," the most challenged book in schools, is about a character with an individual with "e/em/eir" pronouns navigating being queer. The book contains cartoons of a boy masturbating and performing oral sex.
"All Boys Aren't Blue" is a memoir about the experience of a queer black boy coming of age. It describes graphic sexual encounters.
In Missouri, school districts have removed more than 300 books from school libraries, following the state law prohibiting sexually explicit content from the classroom. In Utah, approximately 280 book complaints have been filed in nine of the state's school districts since last May.
Utah's largest school district, Alpine, removed 52 books for "inappropriate content."
Other books banned for being sexually explicit include "This Book Is Gay," a book described as a "how to" guide for the LGBTQ community. It offers tips on sodomy and other sexual activities. It also suggests dating apps to find LGBTQ partners.
Another book, "Flamer," about a gay boy, has been challenged in school districts as it explicitly describes sexual encounters.
"Gender Queer" and others of the same genre are being deemed obscene, which is considered different than "sexually explicit" in nature, PEN American wrote on its website in defense of keeping books in schools.
"The term 'obscenity' is being stretched in unrecognizable ways because the concept itself is widely accepted as grounds for limiting access to content," PEN America stated. "But many of the materials now being removed under the guise of obscenity bear no relation to the sexually explicit, deliberately evocative content that the term has historically connoted."
"We not only applaud the schools that have taken their time to look at these books and have decided to remove them from their media center shelves because they contain no literary value and are obscene in nature; but we also agree that for those books that are not being completely removed, control is given to the parents," Xiomara Castro, a chapter leader of No Left Turn In Education, a group focused on parental rights in education, told the DCNF. "Let the parents decide what their kids can and cannot read."
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