The teachers union and library lobby push gender ideology on kids

This month, the National Education Association (NEA) sent me a warm email. “Happy Pride, Kali!” it opened, as though a month of rainbow festivities is something every subscriber on the NEA mailing list is assumed to celebrate. Of course, these are the same people who would never wish anyone a Merry Christmas because it wouldn’t be inclusive enough. The NEA’s EdJustice team wanted me to know that June is a time to “celebrate our LGBTQ+ siblings,” to “fight for our freedoms,” and above all to “read diverse stories” from the linked Rainbow Book List. They signed off “in solidarity” and promised they “won’t stop until all of us are free.”

Happy Pride, Kali!

Pride is a time to celebrate our LGBTQ+ siblings and what makes each of us unique and special.

It’s also a time to fight for our freedoms. Without the freedom to be ourselves, learn about others, and read diverse stories, there is no Pride.

We’re sharing opportunities to celebrate, organize, read, and learn this month. We won’t stop until all of us are free. 

In solidarity, 

The NEA EdJustice Team

I know what “read diverse stories” means by now, because the people writing these emails stopped being subtle a long time ago. So I took them up on the invitation and looked at the reading list.

The list that the NEA and library establishment celebrate every June is the American Library Association‘s Rainbow Book List, published each year by its Rainbow Round Table. The latest edition has more than 160 titles “celebrating LGBTQIA+ youth and families,” recommended for readers “from birth through age 18.” Birth. Hold onto that age.

But first, it helps to know who builds that list. The American Library Association is not a charity that buys books for poor children. It is a professional guild for librarians, headquartered in Chicago, tax-exempt since 1952, that pulls in more than $54 million a year and sits on roughly $75 million in net assets. Its most recent filing shows $1.3 million spent on executive compensation, with its top director clearing $400,000. This is a wealthy, well-connected nonprofit that reaches nearly every library in the country. So when it publishes a list telling you which books belong in front of your five-year-old, understand what you are looking at.

The donors are not the only ones footing the bill. You are. The ALA spends enough federal grant money every year to trigger a mandatory federal audit, the kind the law demands only of nonprofits running at least $750,000 in taxpayer dollars through their books annually. Most of it flows through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the one federal agency devoted entirely to funding libraries, which sent $266 million to libraries and museums across the country in 2024 alone. 

In March 2025, an executive order was issued to shut down the agency, and the grants started drying up. The ALA took the federal government to court to turn the hose back on, and it won. So here is the arrangement, stated plainly. The same outfit that decided on a how-to guide on chest binding (more on that later) belongs in front of fourteen-year-olds, runs on a budget your tax dollars help fund, and will fight you in federal court before it gives a cent of it back. Now look at what all that money and muscle are actually for.

The Rainbow Book List includes a board book called Bye Bye, Binary by Eric Geron. It is made for ages zero to four and sold as a baby shower gift. The plot, if we can call it that, is a newborn who “refuses to conform to the gender binary.” The book exists to mock gender reveal parties for an audience that cannot yet hold up its own head.

It has plenty of company. The same list gives us It’s a They!, in which siblings use “gender-neutral pronouns to welcome a new baby into the family.” Then there’s Not He or She, I’m Me, about a “nonbinary child” getting dressed in the morning. Hooray for She, He, Ze, and They!, billed as an “informational introduction to pronouns and gender euphoria,” is for the picture book crowd.

For years, the rationale behind bringing these types of books into the classroom sounded at least somewhat plausible. “Some kids have two moms; some kids have two dads, and a book on the shelf that says so is not going to hurt anybody.” The strategy was to lead with the gentlest possible appeal for these books, then paint anyone who objects as the villain of children with LGBTQ parents. That was then.

Today, the reason these books exist is to teach toddlers and early elementary students that they can reject the body they were born in. That their body is a question instead of an answer. A child this young is wired to absorb what the adults around her say, not to question it, and the people writing these books are counting on exactly that.

By the time these kids can read for themselves, the list has more in store. The 2026 list does not skip the grade-schoolers either. Ollie In Between follows a twelve-year-old who, on the edge of puberty, decides that becoming a woman or a man is not for them and settles on a nonbinary identity instead.

The Top Ten for teen readers includes Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding by Maia Kobabe, recommended for ages 14 and up. Librarians describe it as an “instructional guide” that “teaches readers safe ways” to bind their chests. Sit with that. A teenage girl who is uncomfortable in her body can now check out a how-to manual, blessed by the American Library Association, on flattening that body. 

If Kobabe’s name rings a bell, it should. This is the author of Gender Queer, the single most-challenged book in American libraries, the graphic memoir that parents keep trying to read aloud at school board meetings until somebody cuts the microphone. I wrote a blog about this problematic and sexually graphic book after it appeared on a previous NEA summer reading list. Instead of canceling the author for grooming children, they recommended her next book, which encourages teen girls to bind their breasts. 

The rest of the teen shelf is romance and longing aimed straight at kids: a “queer romance” for ages 13 to 18, a trans teenager in a “boyfriend borrowing service,” and on down the line. The 2026 list keeps pace, putting The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood and Boyfriends on its teen Top Ten, a boy-meets-boy vampire romance pitched as “Heartstopper meets Buffy” and recommended for readers as young as thirteen. The NEA says this is about the freedom to “learn about others.” Read the catalog and tell me how much of it is about others, and how much is an invitation for a thirteen-year-old to start auditioning sexualities.

The NEA’s email asked me to sign a pledge stating that everyone deserves to “live, work, and thrive” regardless of their identity. “No exceptions,” it said.

Let us test “no exceptions.” I teach many children from Christian families. Those families believe, as a matter of faith older than the United States, that God makes us male and female, that a child’s body is not a clerical error, and that marriage means something specific. Where are those kids represented on the rainbow shelf? Which Top Ten title affirms the nine-year-old who comes from a home that prays daily and believes she is a girl because God made her one?

There is not one. The “inclusion” runs in exactly one direction. A child whose parents’ faith is not celebrated by this list is the very problem that the list was written to correct. “No exceptions” turns out to be a long list of exceptions and a large portion of the country.

Nobody curates 160+ books every year, sorts them by age from newborn to eighteen, and ships the list to every library and NEA member in the country by accident. The NEA promised they “won’t stop until all of us are free.” On that part, at least, I believe them completely. They will not stop. That is precisely why the rest of us cannot stop either.