A New Children’s Book

At first I thought it was Calvin & Hobbs but it is just “Calvin.”

‘Calvin’ children’s book gives transgender youth a superhero
Boston Globe
By Dana Gerber
November 8, 2021


What’s in a name? For Calvin — the transgender boy at the center of Vanessa and JR Ford’s new children’s book — everything.

“Calvin,” which will be released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers on Nov. 9, follows the titular character as he prepares for his first day of school since coming out to his family and socially transitioning to match his gender identity. This involves picking out his new name, buying new clothes, and getting a haircut — all with his family by his side.

“This book is a love letter to the support networks that a trans child can have,” said Vanessa Ford. “We just wanted the opportunity to show how radiant and beautiful trans youth are when they are supported by all around them.”

Their child is trans so they know what they are writing about.

In the book, Calvin is preoccupied by what ifs: What if his family doesn’t believe him when he comes out? What if his classmates don’t use his preferred pronouns?

“The book itself really focuses on Calvin’s internal thoughts and stressors,” said JR. “We didn’t want to necessarily focus on bullying or any type of real trauma that we’ve seen trans people and trans kids go through.”

We need superheros!

For the children who struggling with gender dysphoria having roll models and books about how they feel is very important. The only roll models that I had growing up was Milton Berle and Flip Wilson, and movies “Psycho” and “Dressed to Kill.” If you snuck in to the library and looked up transsexual you would find “deviant,” “perversion,” and on and on.

“This book comes at a time that hopefully will get people to see that trans kids are just like any other kid — that they are special and unique and beautiful and radiant and all those amazing things,” Vanessa said. “Just like Calvin is.”

The book is coming out when the “Do-Gooders” are ripping LGBTQ+ books off the library sleves. The Trumpsters

Waukee schools pull LGBT books from library shelves after parents express concerns
Des Moines Register
By Sarah Kay LeBlanc
November 9, 2021


The Waukee School District has pulled books off its library shelves after parents complained that the books had exposed their students to inappropriate content.
[…]
Parent Courtney Collier also brought up concerns with books containing same-sex relationships in the board's Oct. 11 meeting. She said her 10-year-old told her that a book about a boy discovering he was gay was brought up as a suggested reading item during a library class.

This is not just a local happening but the conservatives are pulling books all over the country.

"Gender Queer" has also been removed from some school libraries in Texas and Virginia and been the subject of recent school board debate in states including Illinois, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

I find this ironic that the articles are on the anniversary Kristallnacht. Lets stop and think for a moment what political party burned the books? Hint: it was on May 10, 1933.

The censorship has not gone unnoticed around the world.

In Texas and beyond, conservatives take culture wars to classrooms
France24
August 11, 2021


Conservatives in Texas and several other states have declared war on the teaching of books aimed at sensitizing students to racism and gender identity issues, saying they wrongly inflict feelings of guilt on white and non-LGBTQ students.

In one direct result of the campaign, a school district west of Houston last month temporarily withdrew copies of a book that explains the unintentional "micro-aggressions" an African-American child suffers because of the color of his or her skin.
[…]
They "will pop up everywhere in the future, especially in urban areas where there is a conservative push at the state level but where local politics tend to be more Democratic," Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told AFP.

And wherever it goes chaos follows board of education and town meetings are becoming shouting matches.

Conservatives have also lodged angry protests against the teaching of "critical race theory," an academic approach to studying ways in which racism infuses US legal systems and institutions in often subtle ways.

Protests broadly targeting so-called "woke" culture -- a term used to describe awareness of race- or gender-based injustices -- have led to the banning of books seen to include racial stereotypes.

The Texas Library Association has pushed back against what it called "a substantial increase in censorship activity in Texas.”
[…]
And the Texas State Teachers Association has denounced what it called a "witch hunt," following passage by the state legislature of a law that sets specific guidelines for the teaching of racial and sexual inequalities.

Why is this happening now?

May 10, 1933, Nazi-dominated
student groups carried out
public burnings of books
they claimed were “un-German.”

The answer is simple… The Republicans want to rally their base and generate enough anger for them to go out an vote. They want to make LGBTQ+ an issue in the 2022 elections. They don’t want to talk about Jan. 6, they don’t want to talk about “Rebuild America.” They don’t want to talk about the lead water pipes poisoning Americans. They want distract people with their boggymen, Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ+ books, they are like “The Great OZ” who hides behind a curtain.

Hopefully Calvin will not get yanked from the library selves and our children will still have their role model.

~~~~~~~~~

Update 11:15

In an editorial in the Kansas City Star about questioning a Republican congressman sexuality they wrote:

Questioning Hawley’s masculinity is an ugly, odd and ineffective way to respond to someone who’s arguing for a return to old-fashioned, world-dominating, women-subjecting, good-old-days manhood.

These throwback attacks feed into the homophobia that progressives are fighting every day.

To do this is to inadvertently join our junior senator in seeming to pine for 1950s-style notions of what a man should be. Do we really want the retro-sexual comeback?