Suzanne Harrington: Banning books is the new 'blackface'

The censoring of transgender authors by right-wing extremists will not contain the ideas within

Picture: Denis Scannell

When my daughter changed schools aged 9, she was a bit apprehensive — she’d been at a small Steiner Waldorf school since toddlerhood, and state school seemed daunting. But she came home from her first day raving about her new class teacher, Mr Dawson. He was young and fun, loved pop music and Dr Who, and made all the lessons come alive. Having previously hated reading, within weeks she was devouring novels, inspired by her brilliant, visionary teacher.

The following year, Mr Dawson left the teaching profession to pursue his writing career full time; fiction for young adults. And to become Ms Dawson Juno Dawson, these days better known as the hugely successful author of 23 books for young adults, and prominent LGBTQ+ campaigner.

Today, one of Juno Dawson’s titles, This Book Is Gay, is the ninth most banned book in the US — due to its unambiguous content around sex, gender, and teen relationships. 

“The notion that my book can ‘turn kids gay’ is obviously ludicrous,” wrote Dawson in the New Statesman. “If that were true, a lot more teens would identify as the Gruffalo.” Surreally, Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison, whose literary awards are so numerous they need their own Wikipedia page, is on the same banned list, for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Book banning has made a comeback. That thing we associate with Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition is now rife in post-Trump America — and while they haven’t yet had an actual book bonfire outside the Library of Congress, in some states librarians have become foot soldiers in the culture wars. 

The Christian Right — the gun-totin’, bible-bashin’, abortion-bannin’ Muricans running significant amounts of the show — are leading the way. The First Amendment means books cannot be banned nationwide by the government, but this does not protect books from local level bans, usually starting in those bookiest of places, schools and libraries. The irony.

While books were once banned because they contained straight white sex — Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, Brendan Behan, Aldous Huxley, even JD Salinger were banned in olden days Ireland — these days the books which are being banned are those depicting black, queer, and trans sex. 

When in 2018 Malala Yousafzai said how the thing which most frightens extremists is “a girl with a book”, she was talking about the Taliban. What seems to be most frightening to American extremists is a queer teen with a book.

How quaint though, banning a handbag-sized item made of paper and ink and glue, as though by banning the object, the ideas and information inside it can be contained, cannot leak out, cannot permeate the minds of those who seek it. In Belarus, Orwell’s 1984 is banned. In the past, 1984 was banned in China too for being anti-Communist, and in parts of the US for being pro-Communist. 

Today, although the focus of censorship has shifted, the impulse to suppress remains the same. It’s just so — retrograde. Like blackface or thalidomide or thinking smoking is glamorous; an uneducated idea best left in the past.