Perkiomen Valley will prohibit library books with depictions of sexual conduct, including ‘Gender Queer’

The Perkiomen Valley school board voted this week to prohibit library books that contain depictions of sexual conduct, and administrators say they have removed an electronic version of Gender Queer from the district’s collection.

The district’s superintendent described the new policy as a compromise after continued debate around the content of library books — a topic that has inflamed a number of area communities, as conservatives have accused public schools of seeking to indoctrinate children.

An earlier proposal had mirrored a hotly contested policy adopted by the Central Bucks School District restricting both written and visual “sexualized content” — a policy the new Democrat-led Central Bucks board has since rolled back. But Perkiomen Valley leaders now say they’re targeting only visual depictions.

“I want to be very clear: I am not interested in violating anyone’s First Amendment rights or censoring books, but trying to take into consideration values that have been expressed” by the community “and strike a compromise,” said Perkiomen Valley’s superintendent, Barbara Russell.

The policy, approved at Monday’s school board meeting, uses language that Russell said came from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. That language, which Russell said was contained in a recommended PSBA policy for acceptable internet use, defines depictions of nudity and sexual conduct as “harmful to minors” when it “predominantly appeals to the prurient, shameful, or morbid interest of minors; is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for minors; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, educational, or scientific value for minors.”

Informing the school board that the district had pulled an e-book of Gender Queer, the memoir by Maia Kobabe that has been among the most banned books nationally for images depicting oral sex and masturbation, Russell said Monday that other books would be removed if they violated the policy.

“Our staff are expected to recognize when a graphic novel has a depiction or an illustration of any kind of sexual content, then that book is prohibited from being part of our library,” Russell said during the meeting.

In an interview, Russell said that Gender Queer arrived in a batch of e-books as part of a subscription, and that she and a district librarian decided it was “not appropriate.” She noted that both the new and prior board policy give the superintendent — after consultation with teaching staff — ultimate responsibility over the selection and maintenance of school library materials.

“Does it have literary merit? It certainly may, but there are other books that can tell the same story without the sexual content that I feel crosses a line,” Russell said of Gender Queer. She said she had not read the book in its entirety, but had seen the images in question.

A memoir about Kobabe’s experience grappling with gender identity, Gender Queer has been praised by reviewers; Booklist said that “Gender Queer exists so a new generation can see the words and experiences to help them feel whole and seen.” In 2022, the West Chester school board voted to keep the book, finding the images were not pornographic when viewed in the wider context of the 240-page story.

The Education Law Center, a Pennsylvania-based legal group that advocates for policies supporting LGBTQ students, quoted Kobabe while describing the removal of LGBTQ books as “cutting a lifeline for queer youth.”

“Banning from the school library a much-heralded book with unquestionable literary value about growing up queer is a terrible and cruel decision that is totally unjustified even under the district’s new policy,” said ELC staff attorney Ashli Giles-Perkins.

The Perkiomen Valley board — which is majority Democrat after November’s election — approved the new policy 8-0 on Monday. The school district, based in Central Montgomery County, has about 5,000 students in grades K-12. Students had walked out of the high school last year over the prior board’s proposal to adopt a more restrictive policy, which was accompanied by a series of challenges to library books.

Of the new policy, the board’s president, Laura White, said Monday: “We came to a consensus that that’s what was appropriate for our school district.”