Ronnie Riley learned through social media that their first novel was facing censorship. Riley was scrolling late one evening when they saw what appeared to be a leaked school memo. Their middle-grade book about a non-binary pre-teen named Jude was one of four 2SLGBTQIA+ books that Ontario’s Waterloo Catholic District School Board was trying to get out of students’ hands.

The book wasn’t explicitly banned, but there were enough hurdles for kids to access the novel that Danny Ramadan, the chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, called the decision a “shadow ban” in an interview with the Toronto Star. (Ramadan’s book Salma Writes a Book, part of his children’s series about a young immigrant, was also challenged by the school board.)

Riley, whose work so far is most prominent in the Canadian children’s literary scene, says that while they anticipated having some issues in the U.S., it’s difficult to acknowledge that Canada is not immune to book bans. “In the States…they’re more vocal,” Riley says. “But I do believe that it’s happening in Canada, just very quietly.”

Advocacy groups in the U.S.—Parents’ Rights in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty are three of the most vocal organizations—represent a growing trend of censorship there. By re-framing language as advocating for parental rights rather than literary censorship, groups like these have been able to successfully ban books. This harms children by suppressing their ability to access information, though advocacy groups often claim that they’re trying to protect children from explicit and inappropriate materials. And, though in its characteristically slower, slightly quieter way, the same has been happening in Canada, with an increase in book ban requests here in recent years.

It’s not just these authors’ books that are at risk. Without them, children have fewer opportunities to learn about other people and customs, and about themselves. Children’s education and exposure to different ways of life are under threat, and public libraries may be, too.

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In the U.S., recent data from the American Library Association (ALA) found that “[books] targeted for censorship at public libraries grew by 92 percent from 2022 to 2023,” and “47 percent of challenged materials represent the voices and experiences of those in the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community.” In Texas, 578 books were banned in the 2021-22 school year, 424 in Pennsylvania, and 401 in Florida.

Moms For Liberty, a so-called parental rights group that reports having over 130,000 members, has often made the news due to its continuous calls to ban children’s books in libraries and schools across the country. In July 2023, they were successful in getting five books banned across Leon County schools in Tallahassee, Florida. The books had characters dealing with HIV, sexual assault, leukemia, and life after death.

While parental calls to ban books aren’t always successful, the ones that are can set off a political ripple effect for other parts of the country. “What we know to be true in several states is that they’ve been following each other in a race to the bottom about how many books you can ban in how many different ways,” says John Chrastka, executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, a non-profit political action organization focused on fighting book bans in the U.S.

Chrastka references data from the Unpacking 2023 Legislation of Concern for Libraries report, created by EveryLibrary to examine the status of bills in the U.S. aiming to censor access to books in both school and public libraries. Chrastka says that EveryLibrary was able to track that some bills, despite being in different states, were using the same language as one another to ban books. “That cut and paste job—that copycat—is sometimes very explicit,” he says. “And sometimes it’s based on the intent of the law: how can we make it easier to call a book criminal, call a book obscene, call a book harmful?”

There’s a clear “feedback loop,” Chrastka says, between groups like Moms For Liberty and politicians when it comes to banning books, meaning that citizen organizations and political leaders are influencing each other. “It is a witch’s brew of interest groups that are utilizing a fairly soft target—public libraries—which are intended to be, under law, under Supreme Court precedent, public forums, and the materials are available for all—as long as they’re legal,” he says. “If you can say that those books about those human beings are obscene or criminal or harmful, you can make an attack on those populations by proxy, whether it’s LGBTQ or Black and Brown communities.”

When libraries refuse to remove books from their shelves, parents sometimes push to remove their funding altogether in retaliation. Chrastka says that while not every library will lose funding from continuing to stock challenged books, there have been and continue to be states where this is the case. In Alabama, a legislative code change, enacted this past May, made $6.6 million in state funding for public libraries contingent on their compliance with the Alabama Public Library Service Board’s guidelines about restricting access to books deemed inappropriate for certain ages.

This isn’t just happening in southern states. In Michigan, the Patmos Library nearly lost 84 percent of its funding after the town’s residents voted twice that taxpayer money shouldn’t support the library as long as it continued to supply 2SLGBTQIA+ books. But library staff would not remove the books, and after a third vote, the library will remain open.

When asked whether parental requests for libraries to censor 2SLGBTQIA+ materials could lead to budget concerns, the ALA told This Magazine in a written statement that while they don’t have national data to validate this correlation, they felt this outcome was unlikely: “Although it is challenging to quantify, these incidents emphasize the ongoing importance of defending libraries as vital community resources,” the statement reads.

As Chrastka says, though, “This is not a casual social interaction. This is a political movement.” It’s a movement that’s travelling north of the border, and in an unprecedented way.

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Fully banning a book in Canada is a tough task, and it’s not always clear how it can be done. Public libraries, though funded by municipalities, are run by independent boards which have jurisdiction over the contents of their shelves. Libraries usually respond to disputes by following their challenge policies or request for reconsideration policies. In Canadian schools, the process for vetting books often involves the board developing selection methods through training with librarians, and then trusting librarians to implement those methods. Curricula are set by provinces, and teachers decide how best to meet the curricula. It’s not the role of school boards to police individual books, though parents sometimes appeal to them in attempts to bypass any formal selection and reconsideration processes that boards entrust librarians to follow. When these policies do not exist—and they often don’t—it’s often board members and administrators who end up handling the issue and responding to parental pressures.

Shadowbanning, though, is easier to accomplish. It can include what happened to Riley, where their book was moved to a shelf inaccessible by students and “a teacher must provide the Catholic context” before students are allowed to borrow the book. Basically, citizens and school districts are finding other ways to get books out of people’s hands rather than outright banning them. In the words of Fin Leary, the program manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization focused on making the publishing industry more diverse, the goal is to “not have them seen as often.” He says it’s much harder to fight this kind of censorship.

Regardless of whether or not a book is challenged in a public library or a school, book bans affect both readers and authors. A November 2023 statement from the Ontario Library Association said that a diverse representation of books helps students “learn how to navigate differences and develop critical awareness of their environments.” The largest worry, according to Canadian School Libraries, is that groups calling for censorship in the U.S. will continue to inspire Canadians to use similar organization tactics.

According to data from the Canadian Library Challenges Database (CLCD), Canadian libraries facing the most calls for censorship are the Edmonton Public Library (143 requests), the Ottawa Public Library (127 requests) and the Toronto Public Library (101 requests). While the database has information from as early as 1998, some libraries have only reported censorship requests from recent years.

Michael Nyby, the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, said in an article published on Freedom To Read’s website that library challenges from September 2002 to August 2023 represent the highest number ever recorded in Canada in a twelve-month period. According to data from the CLCD, books and events with 2SLGBTQIA+ content made up 38 percent of all challenges in 2022. (Between 2015 to 2021, less than 10 percent of all challenges were connected to 2SLGBTQIA+ matters.) Books surrounding sexual content (19 percent) and racism (16 percent) made up the next highest percentages. The influence of library censorship in the U.S. also extends to books on drug use, abuse, violence, grief, and death.

Though Riley’s novel’s shadow ban was overturned after public outcry, concerns about a rise in book censorship in Canada, and calls to defund in the event that it doesn’t happen, aren’t without reason. At the Prairie Rose School Division (PRSD), a Manitoba-based school board, 11 requests for books to be banned were made in just 2023. Among them were 2SLGBTQIA+ books like Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay. Dawson, who spent seven years working as a sex-ed teacher, described the nonfiction book as “essentially a textbook.” Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of queer life, including definitions of 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, the history of HIV/AIDS, and sex. The book also addresses the importance of queer dating apps and using sexual protection. According to the PRSD, parents proposed banning this book (among multiple others) for reasons of pornography— though the book teaches children about bodies, and is not pornography. The school board said there was “some connection with the Concerned Citizens Canada Twitter account,” but not whether the parents proposing the ban were part of the group, which self-describes as “addressing sexually explicit materials being made available to children in our public libraries.” Still, the group’s account falsely tweeted that This Book is Gay was encouraging minors to solicit sex from adults on Grindr. The school board did not end up removing Dawson’s book (or the others proposed in the ban), but Concerned Citizens Canada is just one of many social and political groups that continue to advocate for book censorship.

In the summer of 2022, Manitoba’s South Central Regional Library was also pressured to remove three books about puberty and consent from shelves. Residents protested a library board meeting, flooded city council meetings, and said public library funding should be removed if the books weren’t, calling them “child pornography.” However, both Cathy Ching, the library services director, and local city councillor Marvin Plett both denied these claims. “Calling books pornographic does not make it so,” Plett said at a Winkler council meeting in July 2023. “Censuring books based on content that some find objectionable can have far-reaching and unintended implications.”

Around the same time, in Chilliwack, B.C., the RCMP were called to investigate after books there were reported for alleged child pornography in schools, too. Also in 2023, library picture books about gender in Red Deer, Alberta were vandalized. A page about using a singular “they” pronoun for nonbinary people was ripped out, according to a news report from the Red Deer Advocate.

Though the case in Chilliwack was dismissed and the books in Red Deer were replaced, parents’ calls to defund the Manitoba library if certain books aren’t removed echoes bills proposed by American lawmakers stressing that libraries should lose funding if bans aren’t enacted. And while books aren’t being overtly removed from shelves in Canada very often, there are other, sometimes more insidious impacts this attitude is having on queer and racialized youth.

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The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system. When asked about whether groups like those in the U.S. seeking to defund libraries for not removing 2SLGBTQIA+ material could affect what happens in Toronto, the media team at TPL said in an emailed statement that its budget is not affected by these groups. “We are governed by a library board and while our budget is ultimately approved by City Council, our materials selection is governed by our Board policies,” the email reads.

TPL’s Intellectual Freedom Challenges – 2023 Annual Report states that none of the requests to remove books from its shelves were successful that year. However, the same report also acknowledges that there are other issues at play. “TPL has experienced objections to 2SLGBTQ+ content outside of the formal request for reconsideration process, with opposition to Drag Queen Story Time programs at five branches and protests at three of them; damage to Progress Pride decals at eight branches; vandalized Pride Celebration displays at two branches; and vandalized 2SLGBTQ+ books at one branch.”

Historical book banning represents violence and censorship. Current book bans, though they may be disguised as parental rights, are more of the same. Vandalism of Pride displays at TPL is another form of violence, and while it may not be physical in nature, it has lasting effects that can harm queer youth for years beyond the act itself.

Banning queer and trans people’s books sends the message that these folks shouldn’t exist, at least not publicly. Ideas like these contribute to the state of widespread violence against them. Recent data from Statistics Canada found that around two thirds of 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians had experienced physical or sexual violence. However, this number could be much higher: data from the same report found that around 80 percent of physical assaults against this group within the year prior to the survey didn’t “[come] to the attention of the police.”

Many 2SLGBTQIA+ people also struggle with feelings of suicidality. In the U.S., data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 29 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide. In Canada, researchers at the University of Montreal and Egale Canada reported that 36 percent of trans people in Ontario experience feelings of suicidal ideation. Systemic discrimination, erasure, and invalidation contributes to this, and book banning is part of this wider package of behaviours that harms the community.

Canadian author Robin Stevenson was interviewed for PEN Canada about her children’s rhyming picture books, Pride Colors and Pride Puppy!, being targeted by the recent wave of book censorship in the U.S. and Canada. “Book banners say that they want to protect children, but they are doing real harm to the very children they claim to protect,” Stevenson said, explaining that “learning to hate yourself was far more dangerous than any book could ever be.”

Leary says that removing these types of books from libraries can send a message to publishers: if they notice that titles aren’t making it to school libraries or are banned, it could discourage them from publishing and promoting them. “As much as the book bans are horrifying, they also are so much scarier when you consider the larger context of why they’re happening—because it’s to legislate folks out of existence, or to legislate folks out of having an education about these topics.”

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Representation matters because it helps reduce stereotypes. Books with diverse representation are vital. They can help teach empathy and understanding, while also showing readers that they aren’t alone in their experiences. Diverse books also teach a fuller picture of history, sharing stories previously overlooked. They are a key aspect of a well-rounded education.

While it is a terrifying moment for queer and racialized writers, authors are not silencing themselves as a result of the pushback. Protecting their work from the possibility of being banned, though, will take a concerted effort on the part of anyone hoping to support them.

Riley believes that the shadow ban of their novel at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board was only overturned because of statements from not only their publisher, but other authors as well. They say they had a sound support system, and that helped.

That kind of unified support is crucial to fostering an environment that permits the continuation of freedom in publishing. Leary says that from an advocacy standpoint, parents opposing book censorship have the most power when they stick together. “Our voices are stronger when we are collectively organizing, and it also kind of allows parents to have each other to lean on,” he says. One way to do this is by communicating with school board members and going to community meetings that include opportunities to speak to these issues.

Riley keeps their final advice to anyone passionate about this issue simple and blunt. “Keep speaking out,” they say. “Keep making sure that books get into the hands of kids—especially queer books.”