A children’s book about a kitten who wants to be a unicorn might have led to a Texas school district halting library book purchases, LGBTQ Nation reports.
In June, the school district in Katy, Texas, a town near Houston, paused buying new books for its libraries and ordered new books that had already been bought into storage. The district had previously been criticized for banning books from its libraries and classrooms, including Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.
At a school board meeting in June, one of the board members, Morgan Calhoun, claimed that she had found books in grade schools that were sexually explicit.
Over the weekend, a “Katy ISD mom” named Anne Russey posted on X—formerly known as Twitter—"Meet the book that triggered the @katyisd board of trustees to withhold thousands of taxpayer funded library books from 94,000 students, weeks before the start of school.”
The post is accompanied by the cover of Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn, a 2021 children’s book written by Shannon Hale and illustrated by Leuyen Pham. The book tells the story of a kitten who wishes she were a unicorn.
Russey posted what appears to be a screenshot of a Facebook message from Katy ISD board member Morgan Calhoun, in which she writes that in the book, “the main character does want to transform into something they are obviously not.” Calhoun also claims, incorrectly, that the book’s protagonist is referred to with the pronoun “they.”
On X, a user named Zach Freeman posted a video in response to the controversy, pretending to be “a concerned parent in north Texas.”
“I’ve checked out a frighteningly propagandistic book,” Freeman said. “I give you Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn. Might as well name it Gay Porn. Show me in the Constitution where it mentions Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn. I’ll wait. … Obviously [this book] could destroy a small child. The negative effects could range from short-term empathy to something worse, like long-term mirth and merriment.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
