This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Deep south Republicans are once again attacking our greatest institutions of education and cultural enrichment: public libraries.
As usual, they want to dictate what kinds of books are accessible to various age groups. The state? Alabama, presumably to the surprise of nobody at all. The target? Why, those wicked transgenders, of course.
These particular restrictions actually go all the way back to a rule established by the Alabama Public Library Service board back in May of 2024. The rule, which might sound somewhat sensible on its face, states that public libraries can lose state funding if they refuse to ensure that “sexually inappropriate” reading material cannot be accessed by minors. Nobody wants kids to “stumble across sexually explicit material in the children’s section of the libraries,” as John Wahl—then leader of the Alabama Republican Party, now APLS chairman and the Trump-approved candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Alabama—said at the time.
It does beg the question, though: Who decides what’s sexually inappropriate?
According to John Wahl and the APLS, the mere existence of transgender people, or the more buzzwordy “gender ideology,” an infuriatingly vague category that Alabama libraries are struggling to identify. APLS board members (in particular, Wahl and Amy Minton) have brought down the hammer on several libraries they deem noncompliant, threatening to freeze state funding that could account for as much as a quarter of their budget, like at the Lawrence County Public Library.
APLS issued a deadline of October 1 for these libraries to comply, removing these “sexually inappropriate” books into their adults only sections and ensuring that library cards tied to minors can’t check out those books without written parental approval. But most libraries operate on a shoestring budget, and barely have the manpower to do their jobs as it is.
Rex Bain, Director of the Lawrence County Public Library, told local news that he and his staff of three part-time employees have been forced to scramble to meet the deadline imposed by APLS, who have repeatedly canceled meetings this year. Pointing out that the library had never received a complaint about an inappropriate book in his 13 years of working there, he told WSFA 12: “To me, it’s like it’s making a lot of work for nothing because it’s not been an issue here. That’s not to say it can’t become an issue, but that’s not our experience at this point. And it’s a difficult process.”
APLS’ unclear rules have cost Alabama libraries countless hours and a ton of money, and what’s worse, board members don’t seem to have a clue themselves: many of the titles flagged by Wahl and Minton for removal aren’t even listed for juvenile readers, and already live in the young adult and adult sections of these libraries that are supposedly noncompliant.
The only Alabama library that has officially had its state funding axed so far is in Fairhope. The Fairhope Public Library had their state funding stripped by APLS back in January, losing tens of thousands of dollars but standing strong and refusing to remove titles Wahl meaninglessly deems “inappropriate.”
Randal Wright, president of the FPL board, said at the time, “My feeling is if you give into something like this, it’s a slippery slope to something more.”
FPL board member Andy Parvin said, “Obviously, the light is on us. We are a small part of the city, and we don’t want to be known and for Fairhope to be known as that ‘rebel’ library. The city requires (state) funding and having relationships on the state level. We have to be sensitive to that. But at the same time, if we want to move the books, they will move the goalpost.”
Read Freely Alabama, an organization dedicated to combatting literary censorship across the state, issued a public statement at the time. About Fairhope, they said: “Wahl ambushed the Fairhope director and board chair with cherry-picked passages – stripped of context and purpose – in an attempt to justify overriding the judgment of a local board and trained professionals,” pointing out that some of the books Wahl wanted the library to remove were classics like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
“Wahl doesn’t understand a crucial tenet of constitutional librarianship – that content in books must be taken as a whole. Instead, he ambushed the Fairhope public library with a list of individual words, which will not pass muster in the Miller for Minors test nor meet the legal definition of obscenity. If he does not grasp those basics, he should not be making these decisions to override trained librarians and local boards.”
This is the underlying truth. These decisions made by Wahl and the APLS very clearly have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of children, and everything to do with a cultural crusade against LGBTQ+ Americans being waged by MAGA freaks all across America. John Wahl doesn’t care about children in Alabama, he cares about erasing the existence of queer Alabamans.
When I was growing up in rural Tennessee, reading material about queer identities was not in abundance. I wish I had been able to read about people who felt the way I feel and experience the things I experience. I would have known myself better and sooner, and I would be a much happier adult today for it. People like Wahl want to steal that opportunity from our kids, and they can’t be allowed to do that.
Here’s hoping more libraries like Fairhope can make the brave decision to stand up against these bullies.
