William Alexander

Because trans kids need banned books

There is a room filled with the ghosts of books. 

You’ll find it in the Bebelplatz, a public square in central Berlin, where Nazis rallied for an infamous bonfire in 1933. Beneath the Bebelplatz and visible through a street-level sheet of glass is a subterranean memorial: The Empty Library by Micha Ullman. This underground chamber has four walls made out of vacant bookshelves. The shelves glow at night, filled with the absence of incinerated pages. A nearby plague is inscribed with a quote from playwright Heinrich Heine: 

“Wherever books burn, people will also burn.”

Many of us were taught about this event in history class, but few of us learned exactly which library was emptied in 1933. The bulk of that bonfire belonged to the Institute for the Science of Sexuality—a groundbreaking source of support for transgender people. Then and now, the most consistently challenged, confiscated, banned, and burned books are queer. 

Today, almost a century later, the groundbreaking stories that offer understanding, compassion, and community to queer kids are vanishing from classroom and library shelves: comics by Molly Ostertag, N. D. Stevenson, Maia Kobabe, and Trung Le Nguyen; novels by Kacen Callender, Alex Gino, and Charlie Jane Anders; nonfiction by Jazz Jennings and Eliot Schrefer. (Nonfiction comics that offer historical context for this sort of thing—Maus by Art Spiegelman, March by John Lewis, and They Called Us Enemy by George Takei—are also disappearing.) The same legislators who champion these egregious acts of censorship are threatening to pass a national ban on trans medical care and calling for the systematic roundup of immigrant families. 

Wherever books burn, people will also burn. 

Read banned books. Protect trans kids. Vote for Kamala Harris. 

William Alexander, author of Goblin Secrets and other award-winning unrealisms.