SC Library Board Member Thinks Kids Get Mastectomies From School

It’s part of the GOP’s continued politicization of small local roles.

by Evan Urquhart

In the modern GOP, everything is political, and all politics is culture war. Across the country, minor local positions which were once dedicated to quietly serving their communities have been drawn into the Republican party’s national crusade. The effort to nationalize local politics threatens to disrupt essential local services from healthcare to education, all the way down to the humble public library.

In Greenville County, South Carolina, the library board alone boasts three committed culture warriors for the GOP. There’s James Hoard, who demonstrated on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overturn the results of the democratic process; Marcia Moston, whose conspiratorial ranting at a recent board meeting included claims that schools are secretly obtaining mastectomies for students without their parents' knowledge; and last but not least there’s board chairman Allan Hill, who publicly berated library staff over the inclusion of LGBTQ+ books on library shelves.

What does a politicized library board look like in practice? Last November, community members in Greenville successfully organized to defeat an effort to have the County Council ban LGBTQ+ books from the children’s and young adult sections of the library. This success was short lived, though, as that effort was resurrected at the level of the library board this year. In a meeting of the materials committee last Monday, members of the board were set to discuss a list of 24 books which the GOP has listed as samizdat. When community members showed up to the meeting, expecting a discussion of the items on this list, they found the agenda had shifted to target books specifically about transgender identities for removal instead.

“Because it was a committee meeting, we knew we would not be allowed to speak,” said Susan Ward, the president of the local chapter of PFLAG. “In one of the stories there’s a picture of me holding a sign saying ‘Trans Youth Exist.’ I made that sign during the meeting, because I was not prepared for this to be what we were talking about in the meeting.”

This was the meeting in which board member Marcia Moston expounded on the conspiracy theories which underpin the effort to ban books about trans identity for young readers. In a video of the meeting, Moston starts out talking about how she believes that reading books about trans identity can cause children to question whether they’re a boy or a girl, then segues into something even further removed from reality. “There's a tremendous move to take this decision out of the hands of parents, yeah, there’s schools in California where a 12-year-old girl can go out and get hormone therapy, mastectomies, and they start them on puberty blockers,” Moston says.

The story Moston told of 12-year-olds getting mastectomies at school was, of course, not based in fact. In California, as in most states, health care decisions for minors typically require parental consent. There are carve outs for mental health care, as well as for pregnancy, abortion, and STDs, but not for puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, or gender affirming surgeries. In rare cases where parental rights have been terminated, as with some youth in the foster care system, non-emergency health care decisions typically have to be approved by a judge. Although a recent change to California law enshrined a right to access gender-affirming care for foster youth, it only ensures that foster youth 12 and over can have input on their case plans around gender-affirming care. The involvement of adults in ascertaining that treatment such as hormone therapy or surgery is appropriate (with judges having the final say if there is a dispute), has not fundamentally changed. There is no scenario where a child’s school would ever provide these services behind a parent’s back.

The culture-war-ification of local politics explains why the agenda of the Greenville County library board has moved away from the normal activities of such a board in overseeing the general management of libraries under their purview, and towards these constantly shifting attacks on the local LGBTQ community instead. Although these attacks seem to be at a fever pitch right now, they didn’t begin with book bans at the end of 2022.

In Greenville, it all started with a controversy over a Drag Queen Story Hour in 2019. The politicization of similar events in the right wing press resulted in a crisis in Greenville, where a planned story hour drew protests and was canceled on a technicality, before eventually being allowed to go ahead. In 2020, Greenville settled a wrongful termination lawsuit after a branch manager was forced out for having supported organizers of the event.

By June 2022, the library board (or rogue members of the board), was involved in sabotaging efforts to support the LGBTQ+ community during Pride. Someone from the board directed managers to order the removal of Pride displays at county libraries by phone, so as to avoid a paper trail. One board member who said she was not consulted resigned in protest over this. Board chairman Allan Hill later displayed where his sympathies lay when he harangued library staff over LGBTQ+ books for 20 minutes, all in public view.

Repeated iterations of culture war nonsense overshadowing the normal operation of local boards is the inevitable outcome of the GOP’s plan to nationalize local politics and impose their will on every corner of American life. These efforts are the result of the nonstop propaganda machine which tells its audience that children in California are getting secret mastectomies and that reading a book about a trans child is enough to turn a child trans.

Assigned contacted Marcia Moston for comment a few hours ahead of publication. We will update this story if she responds.