Publication: Silencing Trans Voices

A new academic article just hit print: “Silencing Trans Voices” over at Politics, Groups, and Identities. I explore challenges to books by and about trans people, mostly kids and teens, in the past decade or so. By developing the common discursive strategies deployed, I link the attempt to erase trans voices from the public sphere to the broader moral panic over trans people.

This article has its genesis in the earliest days of my censorship research. I started ordering public records of book challenges right at the beginning of 2019. I didn’t really have a clear goal in mind, I just started finding stories of book controversies and waited to see what arrived. One day, a package of challenges to three stories about trans kids and teens arrived from a library in Kansas. I was intrigued reading them and the a few more arrived and I started writing. The paper kept getting delayed as I worked on other things and that, sadly, proved to be good as the anti-LGBTQ hate campaign of the past 4 years picked up steam. This meant more and more challenges rolled in for inclusion. The product is my favorite work to date.

The underlying materials can be found here, though a few bits are proving difficult to upload at the moment but I will try to fix it.