A North Carolina county dissolved the board overseeing its public library after the board voted to keep a picture book about a transgender boy in the children’s section.
The Randolph County Board of Commissioners made its 3-2 decision earlier this week at a hearing where about 40 people spoke on the matter, county spokeswoman Amy Rudisill said.
Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at free-expression advocacy group PEN America, said Randolph County’s decision to dissolve its library board is among the most severe penalties she’s seen in response to a controversial book.
“It’s a pretty dramatic response to wanting to have diverse and inclusive books on shelves,” she added.
Conservatives’ objections to children’s books with LGBTQ+ themes, particularly those with transgender characters, have fueled a wave of challenges to schools and public libraries in recent years.
In 2024, the Warren County Board of Supervisors in Virginia took over their local public library over its resistance to removing books with LGBTQ+ content. Voters in Jamestown Township, Michigan, voted twice in recent years to defund their public library over LGBTQ+ themed books in its collection; in May, five librarians quit after an election gave conservatives control over the library’s board. And in October, the former director of the Gillette, Wyoming, library system received a $700,000 court settlement after alleging that she was unjustly fired for opposing efforts to remove books related to race and LGBTQ+ issues.
Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition, which urged people to attend the Randolph County Commission meeting, said she agreed with the commission’s decision to dissolve the library board.
The book at the center of the controversy, “Call Me Max,” depicts a transgender boy who asks his teacher to call him by his chosen name instead of the name on the attendance sheet.
That “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is,” Fitzgerald said. “Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning.”
The book has been banned by three school districts — Carmel, Indiana; Palm Beach County, Florida; Stillwater, Minnesota — and nationally by the Department of Defense in their military schools, Meehan said.
It also featured in a widely circulated image of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), where he held up a blown-up page from “Call Me Max” before signing a bill in 2022 that banned students from kindergarten to third grade from discussing anything related to sex or gender identity. The measure, widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, was later the subject of a legal settlement.
In Randolph County, debate over “Call Me Max” began earlier this year, when a patron asked that the book be moved from away from or higher up in children’s section, Rudisill said. Library staff reviewed the complaint and, on Oct. 9, the library board voted 5-2 to deny the request to move the book.
That led the county board of commissioners to take over the nine-member library board this week and dissolve it, as allowed by state law — with no stated plan to fill the resulting vacancies.
The board took action despite a fairly even split for and against the book during the public comment period at its meeting Monday.
The county itself is overwhelmingly Republican. The county, which is home to about 150,000 people, voted nearly four to one in favor of President Donald Trump.
The book’s author, Kyle Lukoff, who is a trans man, said the situation in Randolph County is particularly discouraging because the library and its board followed their county’s procedures for book challenges and were still punished.
“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” Lukoff said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality”
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