The Scholastic Bookfair used to evoke excitement among kids and offered parents a safe haven brimming with intriguing, educational, and enlightening literature. However, today’s landscape has shifted dramatically as LGBT activists have altered that sense of safety. Scholastic now wholeheartedly endorses not only gay and transgender-themed education and fiction for children as young as preschoolers but also the broader and more extreme transgender and sexual ideologies of the left.
Coinciding with “pride” month, the children’s publishing company introduced its “Read With Pride” resource guide. This guide, along with its associated website and list of books and resources, unapologetically steers parents, educators, and children toward the most extreme left-wing sources on LGBT ideology.
The guide directs users to websites such as Everyday Feminism, Teen Vogue, Rainbow Book List, and The Washington Post, and lists numerous other LGBT activist organizations and references. It uses alarming statistics from The Trevor Project to support the need for these extensive resources, suggesting that a child’s home and family environment could be harmful and require outside intervention and support.
The guide’s primary focus is its list of books for children from ages 0-8 up to 12-plus. These books are categorized by the specific group they highlight, ranging from gay and lesbian to so-called queer, nonbinary, transgender, and asexual.
Gone are the days when the most controversial material might have been books featuring two dads or glossaries defining terms like gay, bisexual, and transgender. Today, children are presented with a myriad of sex and “gender” options, including queer, genderqueer, sapphic, panromantic, and two-spirit. A new term introduced is “allocishet,” defined in the “Read With Pride” guide as “people whose gender and sexuality are privileged by society.”
This term combines “allosexual” (someone who is not asexual), “cisgender” (someone whose current gender matches the gender they were assigned at birth), and “heterosexual” (which remains undefined). A large portion of the content focuses on gender as an abstract concept, described as a “socially constructed category for dividing humans.”
Non-queer individuals are often cast as problematic, frequently mentioned in the context of historical injustices. For instance, “queer” is described as a term that was historically used as an insult by allocishet people. Additionally, “two-spirit” is identified specifically for Native Americans who reject the “colonialist gender binary.”
The guide openly states its intentions: “Books and literature are never neutral; by engaging with queer literature for children and young adults, you are disrupting the status quo that implies being cisgender, heterosexual, and allosexual are the default. You are showing children an expanded way of thinking and being that validates all children and all people.”
The guide’s author, Kazia Berkley-Cramer, is a self-identified queer children’s librarian who uses “she/they” pronouns. She has served on several American Library Association book award committees and co-founded numerous LGBT-specific book awards. Holding MA degrees in Library and Information Science and in Children’s Literature, she is an active participant in projects like Reading While White, which aims to ensure literature for children and teens is scrutinized for anti-racist content.
In her words, Berkley-Cramer seeks to “disrupt” norms and critiques “colonialist” influences, a perspective she shared in an interview with “Teen Librarian Toolbox,” a resource published in the School Library Journal.
When asked what she’d like to see more of in publishing, she replied, “More books by and about queer PoC/Native people. More books by and about trans and nonbinary people, intersex people, ace/aro people. More books by and about queer disabled people. More picture books, beginning readers, transitional readers, and middle grade with LGBTQIA+ representation. More queer characters in all the genres.”
Berkley-Cramer is not an obscure activist but a mainstream figure in children’s literature and library associations. It appears the entire industry has been overtaken by this specific brand of left-wing ideology and activism. Organizations once trusted by parents and educators have now unified under a singular activist agenda.
From the educational requirements for librarians to book awards organizations and publishers seeking recommendations from library associations, the system seems designed to embed a left-wing worldview into all available literature for children. This issue transcends a few inappropriate books in libraries; it indicates a comprehensive shift in the children’s literature publishing industry.
Berkley-Cramer, identifying as queer, aims to ensure every child has access to similar opportunities, believing that all children might eventually identify as some form of queer. Thus, she insists on a wealth of queer literature throughout a child’s school journey to help them identify comfortably. She posits that families may not accept these children and could potentially harm them, making schools the only safe place supported by teachers, librarians, and left-wing LGBT sources.
Instead of merely introducing diversity and broadening children’s worldviews to different people, these efforts present a world where being queer is the norm, showcasing hundreds of slight variations, while viewing the “allocishet” as an outmoded and narrow version of humanity to be regarded with suspicion.
Where can parents turn to escape this pervasive LGBT ideology? When activists are in charge of the curriculum, selecting materials, and promoting a single worldview, publishers aiming to stay relevant will choose content aligned with these ideological preferences. This is more than mere acceptance of gay people in society; it is unmistakable indoctrination, emanating from the most trusted authorities in children’s education and literature.
