These are my comments to the Nashua Public Library Trustees at their April meeting.
There are many picture books in the children’s room accessible to young children promoting the idea that a boy who likes wearing dresses and long hair and jewelry and plays with dolls can become a girl, like “Sam is My Sister,” and a girl who likes to wear pants and short hair and plays with trucks can become a boy, like “Jack (Not Jackie).”
This is damaging for children in multiple ways. It gives children the idea that the clothes they like to wear and the toys they play with can only be associated with one sex and if that child likes to dress differently or play with toys associated with the opposite sex then the only way to live in the world is to change sex.
It introduces the false idea that a child can change sex, that a boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy.
We have many parents in Nashua that believe that, too, and are putting their children on puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones and having healthy body parts removed. This leads to infertility and sexual dysfunction and lifelong chronic serious health problems. These books make it seem so dreamy and fun when the truth is quite ugly.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I thought we were done with this kind of regressive stereotyping of the sexes. In first grade in 1969, I had to wear dresses or skirts to school and so did my female teachers. By second grade, we were allowed to wear pants.
In the 80s I studied in the heavily male-dominated field of computer science and I went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees and I’ve had a three-decade-long career as a software engineer. I never felt held back by anything.
No one thinks anything of women wearing men’s clothes and short hair or men wearing pink and long hair and men wearing dresses and skirts is becoming fashionable.
Men and women can go into any career that their abilities allow them to. We have made so much progress.
Now, with books like this, we are regressing to the 50s and 60s when we put people in boxes based on gender stereotypes. I’m disappointed that the library is being regressive and introducing impressionable young children to this damaging ideology.
