The biggest publishing story of 2023 was the explosion of book-banning efforts in libraries and schools. While concentrated in Florida and Texas, attempts to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters or focusing on America's racial history have spread to a total of 21 states. Such campaigns tend to draw from playbooks created by well-funded conservative organizations affiliated with the GOP, whose motivations aren't hard to surmise. Simply put, they want to undermine and eventually dismantle public school and library systems under the banner of 'parental rights' so that rich people can pay even less tax.
Anxieties about how and when children learn about sex are understandable, and shared by many politically progressive parents. But a lot of social conservatives seem to believe that if their kids simply never find out about homosexuality or transgenderism, they're guaranteed to grow up to be cisgendered heterosexuals. First of all, any number of queer people who grew up in small towns in the 1970s will be happy to assure you this isn't true. But secondly, these days, banning books about LGBTQ+ issues wouldn't succeed in shielding kids from this forbidden knowledge-because that's not how kids are discovering it in the first place.
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