UC Davis

In 2015, Alex Gino published their first novel George and received numerous awards such as the Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award. Despite its success, Gino’s novel has been subject to controversy as it has been challenged and banned for being “age inappropriate.” When George was on the top challenged list from the years 2016-2020, some of the cited reasons for challenging the work were because: it does not reflect “the values of our community,” because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion,” and the novel conflicted with “traditional family structure” (American Library Association). A common thread that lies between each instance of book banning, or challenging, is the involvement of mothers and their need to protect the community of vulnerable children. While none of these phrases specifically mention the roles that parents play in the challenging of this book, it is indexed by key words such as community, child, and family. With right-wing reactions to mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, racial issues following the Black Lives Matter protests, the hyper fixation on assumptions regarding Critical Race Theory, and an increase in anti-queer legislation on both a state and federal level it is not a coincidence that the censorship of books have risen alongside these moments of panic. I want to shift the conversation away from the government to a place that has been seen as much more private – the home. To look within the home, I will examine Gino’s novel that predates the existence of Moms for Liberty as a place of potential overlap between liberal and the conservative mother. A place of commonality is the reliance on a single answer on how to parent a transgender child. I will explore what role secrets play in the anxiety surrounding a trans child, and how secrecy is a privilege that a child does not have within the home. By looking at both the secrets Gino’s protagonist keeps as well as the condemnation of secrecy on the Moms for Liberty X page, I aim to highlight how privacy is something that can be reimagined as protection for a child and a sign of agency within the confines of the home.