Scholastic’s ‘Read With Pride’ Guide Criticizes Those Lacking Rainbow Identity

The Scholastic Bookfair used to be an exciting time for kids and a place where parents could feel safe knowing their kids would have a world of interesting, educational, and enlightening reading experiences. Unfortunately, like so many innocent joys of childhood, LGBT activists have taken that safety away. Scholastic has fully embraced not only gay and transgender education and fiction for kids at preschool age and above but the full spectrum of extreme transgender and sexual ideology of the left.

Just in time for “pride” month, the children’s publishing company released its “Read With Pride” resource guide. The guide, associated website, and list of books and resources all, as the left loves to boast, unapologetically send parents, educators, and kids toward the most extreme left-wing sources on LGBT ideology.

The guide directs to websites like Everyday Feminism, Teen Vogue, Rainbow Book List, and The Washington Post and provides a long list of other LGBT activist organizations and references. It presents a series of scare statistics provided by The Trevor Project to justify the need for such expansive and dedicated resources. All indicate a child’s home and their families are a danger requiring outside intervention and support.

The main purpose, of course, is the list of books available for kids from ages 0-8 up to 12-plus. The books are identified by which specific group they focus on, ranging from gay and lesbian to so-called queer, nonbinary, transgender, and asexual.

Gone are the days of highlighting books featuring two dads or, as astonishing as it is to think about, the simple controversy of breaking out definitions of gay, bisexual, and transgender in a glossary. Now kids get dozens of sex and “gender” options to choose from, including queer, genderqueer, sapphic, panromantic, and two-spirit. They also get a new term to designate anyone who isn’t queer, “allocishet,” which the “Read With Pride” guide defines as, “people whose gender and sexuality are privileged by society.”

The term combines allosexual, meaning a person who is “not asexual,” or cisgender, “someone whose current gender matches the gender they were assigned at birth,” and heterosexual, which they don’t bother to define at all. The content is dominated by the abstract concept of gender, which is defined as a “socially constructed category for dividing humans.”

Anyone not queer is positioned as a problem, constantly referenced in historical injustices. For example, “queer” is defined as a “term historically wielded as an insult by allocishet people.” Not only this, but two-spirit is referenced as specifically for Native Americans who reject the “colonialist gender binary.”

Making it clear what their intentions are, the guide instructs, “Books and literature are never neutral; by engaging with queer literature for children and young adults, you are disrupting the status quo that implies being cisgender, heterosexual, and allosexual are the default. You are showing children an expanded way of thinking and being that validates all children and all people.”

The writer of the guide? Kazia Berkley-Cramer, a self-identified queer children’s librarian who uses “she/they” pronouns. She’s served on the American Library Association’s book award committees and cofounded several LGBT-specific book awards. She has an MA in Library and Information Science and in Children’s Literature. She is frequently interviewed on her activist efforts and contributes to a project called Reading While White, designed to ensure literature for kids and teens is carefully edited for anti-racist sensitivities.

This is obvious by her choice of words — only left-wing activists talk about “disrupting” norms and whine about “colonialist” influences. Another resource titled, “Teen Librarian Toolbox,” published in the School Library Journal, interviewed her and asked her what she’d like to see more of in publishing.

She responded, “More books by and about queer PoC/Native people. More books by and about trans and nonbinary people, intersex people, ace/aro people. More books by and about queer disabled people. More picture books, beginning readers, transitional readers, and middle grade with LGBTQIA+ representation. More queer characters in all the genres.”

This isn’t some obscure activist writing for a left-wing publication. She is mainstream in children’s literature and with library associations. It seems the entire industry of children’s literature has been completely overtaken by this very specific brand of left-wing ideology and activism. All of this trickles down to schools as respectable organizations, long trusted by parents and educators, unite under a singular activist agenda.

From the necessary educational requirements to become a librarian to book awards organizations to publishers seeking library association recommendations, the system is designed to encode a left-wing worldview into all available options for kids to consume. This isn’t an issue about a few inappropriate books being found on library shelves, this is an issue of the entire children’s literature publishing industry.

Kazia Berkley-Cramer identifies as queer, so she feels compelled to ensure every child has the same opportunity. In fact, the current viewpoint is all children have an equal chance of being some form of queer and therefore need an abundant source of queer literature every step of the way through school to ensure they can comfortably identify as such. Their families won’t accept them and, worse, might harm them, so school is the only safe place for them to be themselves. Teachers, librarians, and other adults are the only ones students can trust, plus left-wing LGBT sources.

Rather than the argued goal of simply introducing diversity and opening the worldview of kids to see different kinds of people, these efforts seek to present a world in which queer is the norm, experienced through hundreds of slight variations, and the “allocishet” is an outdated and limited version of humanity that should be shunned and considered with suspicion.

Where else can parents go to avoid this saturation of LGBT ideology? When activists become the people directing the curriculum, selecting the materials, and promoting only one worldview, publishers who want to remain relevant will select content that aligns with those ideological preferences. This is no longer just acceptance that gay people live in our society. This is overt indoctrination, and it’s coming from the most trusted authorities of children’s education and literature.