More than 100 national advocacy organizations, publishers, booksellers, and other groups, including Kirkus, have signed a statement opposing H.R. 7661, a U.S. House bill that threatens to withhold funding from schools that “provide or promote literature or other materials to children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material.”

The bill, which was advanced to the House floor from the Committee on Education and Workforce, would effectively ban schools from providing students with books that contain “any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct.” There are exceptions for “classic works of literature,” which the bill defines as ones listed in “Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 1990), published by Encyclopaedia Britannica” or in two articles by Thomas Purifoy, Jr. and Mary Pierson Purifoy, respectively, that appeared in Compass Classroom, a Christian homeschool curriculum.

“H.R. 7661, if passed, will compel nationwide book censorship,” says the joint statement. “It confuses obscenity with identity and stigmatizes vulnerable young people, particularly trans children and teens, based on who they are. It will continue to drain funding from our already underfunded schools and libraries. And it will threaten the creativity and critical thinking that are vital to education in the U.S.”

Author Maggie Tokuda-Hall, president of Authors Against Book Bans, told Kirkus, “H.R. 7661 isn’t just a nakedly transphobic bill. It’s also one that will create a climate of fear around books that will absolutely lead to more frivolous and ridiculous bans. As we've seen in places like New Braunfels, Texas, poorly written book banning legislation can cause school boards to try and remove more than a thousand books at once in an effort to overcomply, for fear of what will happen if they don’t. Our schools and our kids deserve so much better than this.”

Signatories of the statement include the publishers Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan; the magazines Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and the Horn Book; and the organizations PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and We Need Diverse Books.

Readers who oppose H.R. 7661 are invited to sign a petition and to call their U.S. House representatives to make their position on the bill known.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.