On a sunny day last week, I revved up my chainsaw and trudged out just beyond our garden and henhouse to cut down several trees. I notched a large dead tree and then began the cut on the other side. Suddenly the tree snapped near the ground and fell. With chainsaw in hand, I stumbled backward. Fortunately, the tree fell in the general direction I wanted. After my heart slowed to a normal pace, I began cutting on another dead tree. This went well until I heard the snapping of wood and the tree wobbled. Unsure where it would fall, I again stumbled backward, but this time my feet tangled in bramble, and I fell. The tree thundered to the ground across two fences and terrorized our chickens but missed me.

Jacob's New Dress is a short picture book of twenty-nine colorful pages aimed directly at young children. The title gives away much of the story. The protagonist, Jacob, is a very young boy who enjoys playing dress-up. However, when he plays he enjoys being a princess. For Halloween, he dressed as a witch. He even made a simple dress using a towel. Many of the LGBTQ children’s books that I review contain graphic sexual content or images. This book does not have that but is it appropriate for a public or school library?

Gender Queer is the graphic (comic-style) memoir of Maia Kobabe, published by Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group and released in 2022. We are told that the 256-page book was originally written for adults but it seems to this reader that it is aimed directly at middle-grade students. The book won the American Library Association Alex Award for its “special appeal” to teenagers, but is it appropriate for school libraries and children? That is the question I want to answer for parents as I review the book.

In January of last year, the Biden administration issued an executive order titled, “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” The next month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a directive that extended housing to include dormitories, bathrooms, and showers on all college campuses. This directive further required that the Fair Housing Act be enforced in a way that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Most people have heard the folktale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. What is a Woman is the darker side of the ideological blindness that drives the older tale. Part of the intensity of this Daily Wire documentary is watching Matt Walsh travel all over North America and beyond to find the modern answer to a question that has had a universally accepted definition since the dawn of time. In the film, Matt Walsh strives to get a simple answer to the question “What is a woman.” We might be amused by all the fumbling attempts at answers but, that hides an evil directed at our children.