Alex Gino, the nonbinary author of Melissa — one of the most banned novels in the country — believes the more that books of a particular genre are challenged in school districts across the country, the more those stories need to be told.
Read more on Yahoo News:“Parental rights really anger me, because what about human rights? People who are under 18 are human,” Gino told Yahoo News. “And if you are keeping information about the world from young people, you are leaving them less prepared to learn how to be in the world.”became a target of those seeking to ban books. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.I think it is fear that looks like anger. I think it is a fear of adults generally.
If my book is going to get challenged, that to me is a sign that there are more stories that I need to write. And so I’m writing now about queer and trans kids who don’t just exist but who know each other and who have community and who get to thrive. If they’re going to say, “Don't do it,” then I better not tell myself not to do it. I better do it more.2. The effort to ban books has picked up over the past couple of years, but your book has been challenged since at least 2016.
There were reasons why my book wasn’t banned until 2016. And that’s because it didn’t exist until 2015. A book not existing is its own type of ban against information and against awareness. So had it been any before that point, the cultural ban against thinking about trans children was so great that the book couldn’t even exist. So the book existing is progress, and of course there is pushback to progress. The fact that there is more pushback is a sign that there is more progress.
3. In a blog post, you apologized to your protagonist for naming the book something they did not want to be called. Why was this important to you? She’s not real, but trans people are. And if you’re someone who is cisgender, not trans, and reading maybe for the first time about a trans person, it’s going to have an impact on perhaps how you interact with trans people in the future. So it’s important to say, “No, it’s not OK to call people by something they don’t want to be called.” Even though she’s not real, that’s not the point. The point is it is more important to be respectful than anything.
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