Required Reading: “George” by Alex Gino
March 10, 2022
Given the Governor of Texas’s recent order to treat gender-affirming care as child abuse—which opens the door to investigating parents, teachers, doctors, and others involved in caring for transgender children—and the attempts by some politicians to restrict and deny the rights of people who are transgender, I suggest that everyone read “George” by Alex Gino. The book is about a girl who was assigned male at birth. The story deals with the challenges she faces by being a girl who everyone else sees as a boy and her struggles to make her friends, schoolmates, and family aware of who she is. Although this well-written, beautiful, and touching story can perhaps only scratch the surface of what it must be like to be transgender, I think it is a good starting point for those interested in the challenges that children who are transgender face, particularly those of us involved in bullying prevention work who understand fully how being seen or labeled as different or discriminated against legislatively can make a child the target of aggression in the classroom.
I happened upon “George” as I decided to make this month my personal “banned books month,” in which I would read as many books as I could that are currently facing bans by parent and political groups. To me, banned books are fascinating as they reveal what the groups seeking to ban them fear and implicitly illustrate their ideologies and world views. For example, Nazis banned books that did not align with their regressive conservative ideologies of German racial purity and “traditional values.” The books that groups are seeking to ban in this country do not seem to align with a similarly regressive conservative ideology. I must say that I am grateful that the loud and boisterous efforts to ban these books in schools and libraries have brought them to my attention, and to the attention of people everywhere, particularly students, all but ensuring that they will be widely read.