The Downers Grove fight over Gender Queer, 2021–22

In November 2021 a meeting of the school board for Community High School District 99 in Downers Grove, Illinois, became one of many local battles over books in American schools that year. Parents objected to Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe being available in the libraries of Downers Grove North and South high schools. Students organised to defend it.

The book

Gender Queer, published in 2019, is a graphic memoir in which Kobabe, who is nonbinary and uses e/em/eir pronouns, describes growing up and coming to terms with gender identity and sexuality. It contains some sexually explicit illustrations. It won an American Library Association Alex Award in 2020 for books for adults with appeal to teenagers. From 2021 it became one of the most challenged books in the country, according to the ALA.

What happened in Downers Grove

• At the November 2021 board meeting, residents objected to the book, while students and other residents spoke in support. Fifteen parents filed a formal challenge to the book.
• Under the district's policy, the principals first decided to keep it. A reconsideration committee of parent representatives then reviewed it, meeting in March 2022.
• The committee recommended keeping the book, concluding that it did not meet the legal definition of pornography. The superintendent agreed.
• On 6 June 2022 the board voted 7–0 to accept the recommendation. The book stayed on library shelves.

Students involved in defending the book later received a state intellectual freedom award from the Illinois Library Association.

The arguments

Parents who objected said the images were inappropriate for minors and that schools should not make them available. Supporters argued that the book was in libraries, not assigned reading; that removing it would deny LGBTQ students books reflecting their experiences; and that challenges should go through established review policies rather than public pressure.

The legal backdrop

In the US, courts have held that school boards have broad discretion over curriculum but more limited power to remove library books because of disagreement with the ideas in them, following the Supreme Court's 1982 plurality decision in Board of Education v. Pico. In 2023 Illinois passed a law tying state library grants to policies against banning books for partisan or doctrinal reasons. Other states have moved in the opposite direction, making the issue a continuing legal and political fight.