A committee formed to weigh the propriety of library books for the Conway School District is recommending that two challenged works remain accessible to students.
Made up of a principal, a media specialist, a teacher, a parent and a central office administrator, the committee was tasked with examining books whose propriety has been challenged. A Conway man, Brian Parsons, is pressuring the school district to get rid of “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” by Susan Kuklin and “Felix Ever After” by Kacen Callendar. Parsons acknowledged in his challenge that he had not read either book.
The committee is scheduled to present its recommendations to the Conway School Board in a meeting at the high school auditorium off Prince Street at 6 p.m. Tuesday.
With a proposed restroom ban, a couple excitable new board members and plenty of craziness on the agenda, the meeting should offer more entertainment at our children’s expense than a night of Netflix.
Not coincidentally, both books under review are about transgender teens. Plenty of sex scenes, even rapes and incest, have appeared in some of the world’s finest literature, not to mention more than a few Harlequin-type romances, quietly popular among some church ladies. But the only books generating controversy in Conway relate to the LGBQT community.
Notes obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act indicate committee members found that “‘Beyond Magenta’ is useful as a self-teaching tool for kids who may not know who they are.” A committee member wrote “Find yourself in a book” beneath that statement. Another note correctly pointed out that pornography “has to illicit arousal” — a definition supported by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. The institute’s website says pornography is “material that depicts nudity or sexual acts for the purpose of sexual stimulation. However, the presence of nudity or sexual acts in [a] piece of media does not necessarily make that media pornographic if the purpose of that media form is something other than sexual stimulation.”
Learning about oneself, for example, would be an example of when it’s helpful to read about sex.
The other book, “Felix Ever After,” is also about a transgender teen. On this novel, a committee member wrote that it was “relatable” and deals with challenges our children face daily. Notes indicated some concern about the book’s language and the depiction of drinking and smoking marijuana. But as we know, most of us learned about habits, good and bad, not from books but from our own families or friends.