Hadley’s Crusade – A Manhattan Beach Councilperson takes aim at two books
Second of two parts (part one 2/10/22)
by Mark McDermott
Councilperson Suzanne Hadley’s choice of the books Gender Queer and Lawn Boy as targets in her recent appearances before the Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education was not coincidental. Both books are among the targets in a book-banning movement that has arisen nationwide over the past year.
The movement seeking bans on these two books specifically appears to have gained momentum last September when the Fairfax County school board in Virginia voted to have Gender Queer and Lawn Boy removed from its district’s libraries due to their sexually explicit content and use of profanities.
Gender Queer author Maia Kobabe, writing in the Washington Post, recalled being tagged on Instagram the night of September 23 and looking in some confusion at a post that included a video of a public meeting.
“‘Here are the sickos who wrote those awful books,’ wrote a commenter, tagging me and another author, Jonathan Evison,’” Kobabe wrote, referencing the author of Lawn Boy.
Gender Queer and Lawn Boy are not alone. The American Library Association reports that 330 books are currently “under challenge” in the United States, including 155 incidents of outright censorship, by far the most since the ALA launched its Office for Intellectual Freedom in 1967.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented volume of challenges…In my 20 years with ALA, I can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, OIF Director.
What is different about what Hadley is doing is that she is not seeking removal of either book from any library. Neither is on the shelves of the Mira Costa High School, and both are available, via the Los Angeles County library system, at the Manhattan Beach Public Library, where Hadley works as an aide. What Hadley wants removed is a link on a MCHS website page. That link, to a page titled “Book Award Lists” which links to 10 different book awards, does not include a direct reference to Lawn Boy or Gender Queer.
Hadley, at the December 15 school board meeting, took aim at Lawn Boy, which she referred to as “propaganda.” She urged school board trustees to remove a link to the Alex Awards, a recognition given by the ALA to “books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.” Hadley told the school board trustees Lawn Boy was “not well written” and “closer to smut or propaganda” than to literature.
“It’s almost unreadable due to its reliance on profanity,” she said. “There are 50 obscenities on the first 37 pages, words I cannot say in this room, nor print in a newspaper. On page 36, there are 13 profanities on a single page, including the C-word. How brave, how literary is that? A better idea would be for our school board not to allow links to books with the C-word in them. The C-word alone should be disqualifying for children. I’d like our school board to take a pledge, just like doctors take, to first do no harm.”
When she came back to the school board a month later, on January 12, Hadley took aim at Gender Queer, another Alex Award-winning book. Despite the presence of children in the room and against the repeated requests of school board president Sally Peel to not do so, Hadley read a passage from the book that included a “ C-word,” as well as the description of a sex act.
“Children do not need help finding smut or titillating content,” Hadley told the school board after reading the passage. “Garbage is all around us. Our students do need caring adults to help them find the true, the good, and the beautiful in the world. This is not censorship. This is not book banning.”
Her remarks set off a firestorm. Hadley was vilified and defended throughout the community on Facebook and NextDoor. At the January 18 council meeting, her appearance at the school board generated far more public comments — roughly 90 minutes worth — than anything else on the agenda. Residents spoke both for and against what Hadley had done.
Local resident and Realtor Ray Joseph praised Hadley. He said the topic she addressed was critical because what is being taught in local schools is what is driving enrollment down.
“I think Susan Hadley is just pointing out the tip of the iceberg,” Joseph said. “It is more than just one book. And I’ve seen the pornographic images that were inside that book and I don’t want my kid seeing those; I don’t want any other kids seeing those. But it’s what’s happening with the EDSJI [Equity, Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion] agenda — they are doing it in little bits and pieces across the entire school system. I’ve talked to parents who have not only pulled their kids out of our schools, who have sold millions and millions of dollars worth of properties, and moved out of this state, because of this curriculum…. We start losing these top grade families, our schools are going to take a nosedive. And when you try, and say that, then she’s being ‘divisive.’ And she’s just reading some of the material that’s going on in the schools.”
Another resident, whose name was not discernable, said the issue went beyond Gender Queer.
“If it was just this book that’s being pushed down children’s throats, that might not be the issue,” he said. “But there’s also the issue of children being asked their sexuality and how do they identify, and are they homosexual? Like, who is driving this agenda? Wake up. How much more are you going to see that there is some perversion going on in this state and across other jurisdictions?”
The cover Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel memori published by Oni Press in 2019.
Resident Madeline Kaplan said Hadley’s appearance was damaging to the relationship between the school board and city council, and said the issue raised concerning Gender Queer at its core was about parental rights.
“When I first learned of the book, I thought it was required reading,” Kaplan said. “And I thought ‘Oh no, that’s not good, because I wouldn’t want my children reading that.’ I later learned that it wasn’t, and I later learned it wasn’t in the library. But you know what, I probably still wouldn’t have signed the permission slip, because for my children and some other reasonable parents, I know that they would agree that their children shouldn’t read the book. But I know other reasonable parents who would agree that it is appropriate to read the book. I come from a large Irish Catholic family, and we have several gay family members that we love. One of my cousins is trans, and I thought, ‘You know, her father might have signed that permission slip if it was offered, and her father might have thought how helpful that would have been with her journey. I also don’t think it’s helpful to villify and target LGBTQ kids or adults at public meetings for their identity. I think this sends a hurtful message to our LGBTQ youth, and adult community members. And I don’t ever think that people should talk about perversion and LGBTQ people in the same sentence. It’s just not loving thy neighbor as thyself.”
Public discourse in Manhattan Beach has become fraught with such issues.
At the January 18 council meeting, a woman identifying herself only as Allison began reading a passage from Gender Queer that was about the author’s youthful horror regarding menstruation. As Allison read a detailed passage involving smeared blood, Mayor Hildy Stern cut her off.
“This is content that would not be appropriate if students or young children were listening,” Stern said. I would appreciate it if you would not…”
“Well, this is a political statement,” Allison interjected. “And I have a right under the First Amendment to speak the way I want.”
Then Allison muted herself. The next speaker, lifelong local resident and Mira Costa graduate Laura Kastner, wondered why menstruation could not be talked about.
“I’ve been watching what’s been happening from afar, and I’m extremely concerned about Suzanne Hadley, and her seemingly bombastic comments at school board meetings, which have turned into a circus across the nation,” Kastner said. “What Allison just read was normalization of menstrual periods, which I think is really strange that that would be a taboo subject in 2022. And to hear Manhattan Beach going this way…having grown up here myself and gone to Mira Costa, I can tell you, it has not been this conservative bastion in the middle of the South Bay, which a lot of people are thinking because they’re talking on social media. I’m shocked that someone would go Fahrenheit 451 at a school board meeting like that.”
Fahrenheit 451 is a book written by Ray Bradbury in 1953 that depicted a dystopian future in which books are outlawed and “firemen” are tasked with burning any books that they can find. Bradbury was writing in response to a book banning movement that arose during that time, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led an eventually unsuccessful effort to ban 30,000 books that he and his allies perceived as sympathetic to Communism.
Hadley and her supporters have repeatedly said their efforts have nothing to do with book banning or censorship. Hadley is an avid reader, hyperliterate, even, and has said that her decision to speak out came only after parents’ concerns over the books in question were ignored by MBUSD leadership. At the February 1 council meeting, Hadley said that last fall some concerned parents met with MBUSD Superintendant John Bowes and two board members, and when they presented “the infamous page 167” of Gender Queer — the page she would later read from — the district officials turned the book upside down on the table but refused to take the action of removing the Alex Award link. This was when she decided to speak up, Hadley said, in order to advocate for the safety of children.
“I was labeled a book burner, a book banner, a government censor, a Fox News stooge, and an idiot,” Hadley said. “The mayor said I was ‘confrontational, insensitive, disruptive and disrespectful.’ The prior MBUSD superintendent, who by the way is not a local parent, taxpayer or resident as I am, said that I was on the wrong side of history, along with Nazis and Soviets. His public blog stated that, ‘Politicians use manufactured indignation to agitate their base.’ He said my choice to speak up against obscene books was ‘a threat to freedom.’ So who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? The issue isn’t what I did or how. I was the messenger. The issue is the message.”
The message
The National Coalition Against Censorship deems Hadley’s efforts an attempt at censorship.
Nora Pelizzari, NCAC director of communications, said that despite Hadley’s assertion that she is not attempting to censor the books in question, her actions very clearly meet the definition of censorship.
“Most censors say, ‘This is not censorship,’” Pelizzari said.
A key aspect, Pelizzari said, is that as an elected official Hadley is in a position of authority.
“There has to be an authority, or a sort of power differential, for there to be censorship,” Pelizzari said. “Censorship is any attempt to limit or curtail or prevent information from being accessed. Information can include art, it can include books, it can include ideas. But this is a very clear attempt at censorship.”
In this case, the information in question are stories. Pelizzari said that removing a link leading to the Alex Awards is an attempt to deny access to stories that students, teachers, and anyone using the Mira Costa library website, might find meaningful — perhaps they want to better understand the viewpoint of someone who is nonbinary, in the case of Gender Queer, or explore the difficulties of working class life, in the case of Lawn Boy.
“I can think of nothing more clearly [that represents] viewpoint discrimination,” Pelizzari said. “This is entirely based on this individual person’s viewpoint that she disagrees with this information. The idea that this isn’t censorship is laughable.”
Another argument Pelizzari makes that this is attempted censorship is that it removes the choice from other parents.
“School districts allow parents to put guard rails around what their own kids are allowed to read,” Pelizzari said. “What parents are not allowed to do, and what Hadley is not allowed to do, is put guard rails around what everyone’s kids are allowed to learn, and what everyone’s kids are allowed to know. Her viewpoint cannot dictate what ideas all students in the district are allowed to have. We cannot allow that. There’s nothing less American than that.”
Superintendent John Bowes said that guardrails allowing parents to have the final say in what their children read are firmly in place within MBUSD.
“The importance of parent involvement in their child’s education cannot be overstated,” Bowes said. “MBUSD encourages all parents and guardians to discuss their child’s reading and learning interests with them, and to assist their child in choosing supplemental school assignment and recreational reading titles consistent with their family’s values, beliefs, and educational interests.”
Similar attempts to remove books from lists and libraries are occurring across America, part of a larger movement that is pushing back against efforts at increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in schools. In Oklahoma, a bill is under consideration that would outlaw public school libraries from holding books that focus on sexual activity or gender identity. In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade classroom module examining the Holocaust because of the book’s use of nudity and curse words. In Texas, a legislator is investigating 850 books he believes might “make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” over issues of race or sex, while Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Education Agency to conduct criminal investigations into school libraries. “The fact that pornographic material that serves no educational purpose has been made available to students in Texas public schools is a clear violation of the law,” Abbott wrote.
This movement goes beyond books and into classrooms. PEN America, a non-profit that defends free expression and literature, has identified 155 bills introduced in 38 states that would place new restrictions on what teachers can say in classrooms. In Florida, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would ban discussions of sexuality and gender in schools has passed subcommittee and has the support of Governor Ron DeSantis.
Both DeSantis and Abbott are presidential hopefuls for 2024. Pelizzari said that censorship efforts are often intertwined with political ambitions.
“Censorship as an issue is an equal opportunity offense,” she said. “Censors come from all spots on the political spectrum. But right now, we are seeing a coordinated political attack on books that tell stories of previously underrepresented groups in schools and libraries. What we’re seeing is very much a backlash to attempts over the last 10, five, and particularly two years, since the George Floyd protests in 2020, to diversify school curricula and school libraries. Those attempts to just include more voices and include more viewpoints are sort of part of what’s fueling this backlash. But it’s also proven to be an effective political tool, and an effective fundraising tool. And it’s proven to be a sort of media friendly issue to excite certain electoral groups.”
Hadley, in an email, said her motivations in addressing this issue are parental, not political. She raised four children, all whom went to MBUSD schools, and, though they have all graduated, she would not want them to be exposed at a young age to books like Gender Queer. Beyond the library website link to the Alex Awards, she believes that a 9th grade teacher at Mira Costa recommended the book.
“Some have criticized me for reading obscene material from Gender Queer out loud in a public setting (after giving fair warning to parents in the room with young children),” Hadley wrote in the email. “Yet the book I read from was recommended out loud by a teacher of 13 and 14 year old students. If the content was too graphic and sexualized for a general audience of adults, is it not too sexualized for our children? Of course, it is. Res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself.”
Politics
As Hadley alluded to in her remarks at City Council on January 18, what she and the parents who are allied with her ultimately seek is a board policy that would prevent what they consider to be obscene material from being recommended by or housed in MBUSD libraries. Such a policy would be similar to what has been enacted elsewhere, such as in Texas and Oklahoma. The current school board is unlikely to enact such restrictions, but three seats — a board majority — will be up for election in November, as well as both Hadley’s and Stern’s seats on the council.
This is why some observers believe that what Hadley is doing has larger political intent. According to MBUSD, not a single student has thus far chosen Gender Queer (and gone through the parental consent process) as an outside reading assignment — although, given the attention the book has now received locally, that may soon change, and a. A senior at Mira Costa, Garrett Nose, spokesaid at the January 18 council meeting and saidthat he and his friends went looking for the book after Hadley’s comments at the school board. By raising the issue, Hadley will almost surely attract more kids to the books within MBUSD then would have otherwise been the case, which was clearly not her intent.
Hadley faces a challenging reelection battle, given how polarizing her term on the council has been, and the fact that although council seats are non-partisan (no party affiliations are on the ballot), Hadley is a Republican in a largely Democratic town — 47 percent are Democrat or Democratic-leaning, compared to 32.6 percent who are Republican, or Republican-leaning. Even so, four out of five current council members are Republican-leaning, so voter turnout in local elections still trumps party affiliations.
Mayor Pro Tem Steve Napolitano sees the unfolding book conflict and Hadley’s role in it as not only political, but indicative of the hyperpartisan turn politics have taken not only in Manhattan Beach but across the country.
“I think we’re facing two challenges on the national and local level,” Napolitano said. “The first is how politics has become a game of getting power and/or keeping power at the expense of solving real problems. The second is the inability of a single narrative to take root anymore. Where we once trusted certain sources to tell what most folks would consider the ‘truth,’ social media has given rise to many sources willing to tailor the ‘truth’ to people’s predisposed leanings — and if it increases their clicks and likes, all the better. So much so that what may have once been considered outrageous and vile will now find a welcoming audience in some corner of the internet today. The narrative on any issue is so fractured these days that a lot of people seem to be more interested in winning the argument than understanding what anyone else is saying or why they’re saying it. And so here we are, and Manhattan Beach has certainly not been immune to these challenges the last couple of years, including our school board.”
What Hadley said at the school board, Napolitano suggests, fits into this social media style of politics. And the rumors floating around this issue portrayed as fact on social media and elsewhere cohere with his argument — one was that an influential, left-leaning parent was able to have Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn removed from the Mira Costa library due to its use of the “N-word.” Multiple copies are still at the library, according to MBUSD). The other false rumor is that Gender Queer and Lawn Boy were on MCHS library shelves until this fall. Neither book has ever been part of the MCHS collection, according to MBUSD.
Napolitano said this issue is not about the books.
“I don’t think the most recent controversy at our school board had as much to do with a link to a book that no students were bothering to read, as much as it was about the next election of school board members in November,” he said. “But that’s me.”
Former mayor and councilperson Russ Lessor disagreed. He takes Hadley’s argument at face value and believes she is onto a larger issue — that gender identity and race-based ideology is creeping into local schools and causing parents to pull their kids out en masse.
“I have a friend who works for a private Christian school and she gets calls all the time from parents,” Lessor said. “The first questions are, ‘Are you teaching Critical Race Theory and gender identity?’ And then she says no, and they’re interested in the school.”
No evidence exists that CRT is being taught in local schools and MBUSD leaders have strenuously rejected the suggestion that any ideology is part of instruction. But enrollment has dropped from 6,350 students three years ago to 5,659 this year. District officials cite the pandemic as largely responsible, because many parents relocated to where schools were open. Lessor acknowledges, because he no longer has children in MBUSD schools, so he isn’t certain what is being taught, and stresses that he fully supports local schools, financially and otherwise. But he nonetheless worries public education has been infused with ideology.
“I think there are certain roles for parents to play and certain roles for the school to play,” he said. “And I think it’s getting confused.”
Napolitano, who is a Republican, is the most experienced elected official in Manhattan Beach, having served five terms on the council and worked as a deputy to former Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe. Like Knabe, Napolitano subscribes to a somewhat more old school, relationship-based school of politics, what he has described many times as the “canoe” style in terms of partisanship — paddle right, paddle left, and find your way to the middle, making sure everybody is represented in the boat (rather than just one set of voters) and the fundamental tasks of public agencies are getting done.
But while the partisanship of the issue concerns Napolitano, Hadley’s appearance at the school board does not.
“Regardless of motive, Councilmember Hadley was certainly within her rights to appear and speak at the school board on any issue she wanted to speak about,” he said. “No laws were broken. Elected officials appear to speak before other elected bodies all the time. There can be implications for doing so depending on what’s said, but that comes with the territory. Did she disregard the rules of decorum? Was her language offensive to young ears and old? Were there other ways she could have dealt with the issue? Well, that’s what elections decide.”
The cover of Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, published by Algonquin Books in 2017.
Literature
Stephan Oliveira has watched the Gender Queer issue arise in his former hometown from afar. He now attends Yale University, part of the Class of 2024, where he is pursuing a degree in psychology. The issues this debate brings up for him are as visceral as they are political.
Oliveira is a transgender man who grew up transitioning — the word used to describe people who identify with a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth — in Manhattan Beach. He suffered abuse while doing so.
“Growing up in the South Bay as a transgender student, I was the subject of harassment, discrimination, and microaggressions that led me to be diagnosed with c-PTSD in my adulthood,” Oliveira said. “I cannot emphasize enough how innately traumatizing it is to be transgender in a transphobic community. I believe that a major source of the attitudes towards me by my peers was a consequence of systemic factors that have not integrated education on transgender and gender diverse experiences, and culturally conscious narratives, especially because of how homogenous Manhattan Beach is as a community.”
Students who have never met people who are different than them and have not even contemplated such people exist, Oiveivera said, are much more likely to engage in discriminatory practices. He said that is why books like Gender Queer are crucially important.
“Representation in diversity in media is imperative in a community such as Manhattan Beach because it inoculates the community against engaging in the behaviors that lead to harming individuals who do not fit the mold,” he said.
Such books can also serve as a life raft for kids like Oliveira, who are different from their peers. Being a teenager has its challenges for anyone, but for kids who face struggles with gender identity issues, the challenges can be more dire.
“When you are existing as a marginalized individual in a community where you do not have role models you can see yourself in, discovering role models in the abstract that you can cling to can be immensely transformative and powerful,” he said. “Hiding these voices does not prevent youth from being LGBT+, which seems to be the concerns that people have by the acceptance of these identities. Rather, hiding these identities leads marginalized individuals to feel as if their own identities are entities to be ashamed of, which is an experience that I have had to unpack in the present.”
Oliveira, who began his college studies at El Camino and transferred to Yale, said he is currently taking a class on transgender history. He said that when politicians like Hadley deem books like Gender Queer “propaganda,” they are following a century-long tradition of discrimation against transgender people.
“Acknowledging that LGBT+ individuals exist does not ‘turn’ others into LGBT+ individuals,” he said. “It merely signals that it is safe to express yourself in a non-normative manner if that is what is most comfortable for you.”
Pelizzari, from the National Center Against Censorship, said the nationwide book banning effort frequently describes of such books as Gender Queer, Lawn Boy, and even author Toni Morrison’s books, as propaganda.
“There’s this narrative being spun by those who would censor, that the existence of complicated, difficult or even upsetting sexual experiences in books, ‘promotes’ those types of sexual experiences,” she said. “But actually, they just reflect the reality of how a lot of people experience sex in their life. A lot of the books being challenged recently are memoirs, or are based on the author’s life story… The idea that depicting any sexual encounter promotes whatever type of sexual encounter that was in the book — it’s just not how literature works.”
Critics of books such as Gender Queer, including Hadley, do not argue specifically against the LGBT+ community or individual’s rights. But Pelizzari said that those who seek to ban or censor such books are not accurate to in calling the books pornography.
“Obscenity and pornography have definitions, and none of the books that I have heard challenged meet them,” she said. “Because the definition requires the book to lack literary, artistic or educational value. And the fact that you can read Gender Queer and learn from it, and find it valuable in your understanding of the world proves that it has literary, artistic and educational value. Whether you think it’s right for your kid or not is your decision to make. But the fact that it depicts sex does not make it pornography.”
Pelizzari said it is telling that Gender Queer is at the forefront of book banning efforts nationwide, despite the fact that not a single public school district in the country includes the book in its cirriculum.
“This is an attempt to determine for everyone what will be allowed to be known,” she said. “This is an attempt to say kids are only allowed to know what I want kids to know. And it’s an attempt to determine what future generations are allowed to believe, to limit their education, to say there are certain ideas you aren’t even allowed to engage with. It is a long-term strategy to impact the belief of an entire generation, and it’s a short-term strategy to win elections under the guise of parental rights.”
Gender Queer author Maia Kobabe wrote in the Washington Post that her main intent in writing the book was to increase understanding.
“When I was on book tour in 2019, I was asked many times, ‘What age of reader do you recommend this book for?’” she wrote. “I would generally answer, ‘High school and above,’ but the truth is, the readers I primarily wrote it for were my own parents and extended family. When I was first coming out as nonbinary, I kept getting responses along the lines of, ‘We love you, we support you, but we have no idea what you are talking about.’
But Kobabe, who uses the pronouns e/eir/em and identifies as queer, nonbinary and asexual, also wrote it for kids who might see some version of themselves or their friends in Gender Queer.
“There are a lot of people who are questioning their gender or questioning their sexuality and having a really hard time finding honest accounts of somebody else on the same journey, who is speaking from a place of humor and gentleness and trying to just understand who I am in the world,” Kobabe told NBC News. “There are people who really need this material, for whom this is vital, and for whom this can be maybe even life saving.” ER