In the wake of the election, writer Maggie Tokuda-Hall joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss what Project 2025 has in store for authors and book bans. Tokuda-Hall explains Project 2025’s misuse of terms like “critical race theory” and “pornography” and how these will be used to attack mainstream content, especially material by BIPOC and LGBTQ creators. She analyzes conservatives’ plans to make reading less accessible to the general population and talks about co-founding the new organization, Authors Against Book Bans. She also reflects on her experiences with corporate attempts to censor her books for children and young adults, the importance of libraries, and how individuals can resist by connecting with others and by understanding and focusing on their own expertise.
Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: There have been a lot of discussions about what a recent article I saw on the BBC calls Project 2025’s “wish list for a Trump presidency” and there was a recent article in our parent publication, Lithub, that focuses on how this wish list might apply to books. The author, James Folta, quotes you as saying that project 2025 is “the single most expansive extreme attack on our freedom to read that we’ve seen.” Care to expand?
Maggie Tokuda-Hall: Yeah, so Project 2025, the mandate for leadership, is a 900-page book full of just extremist policy ideas. And I think it’s best summed of how it’s going to affect intellectualism as a whole, in that their goal is to defund the Department of Education. I think that’s a solid starting place for understanding kind of what they’re looking at here.
They’re also trying to defund a huge amount of our public institutions of learning, but with caveats about how any institution that promulgates what they call “critical race theory,” which is sort of a boogeyman term that they use in a way that is different from its true meaning… So, its true meaning was coined by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and is a way of understanding how our different identities intersect in such a way that it affects how we interface with the law. They use it to mean any narrative or history or textbook that doesn’t center the classically privileged white experience of the United States is critical race theory. Anything that centers people of color, anything that speaks to the racist traditions in our law, they call critical race theory, and they say that any institution that promulgates critical race theory should lose its federal funding. I think a lot of people don’t quite realize what that will mean, but most public schools and public libraries receive the lion’s share of their funding from the federal government, and so this would have a huge impact on what books and what curriculum schools and libraries are allowed to teach.
Not only that, they also come after pornography, which just on its face is a little bit frightening for anyone who’s a fan of the First Amendment. But they don’t use pornography in sort of the traditional sense, the Miller-test-sense of the word. Pornography is a word that has been increasingly legalized by the extremist far right to refer to anything that represents an LGBTQ person or any LGBTQ content. So they talk a lot about how transgenderism is a disease in the United States that needs to be eradicated. And they talk about pornography the way that they talk about “illicit drugs,” and that anybody who creates it should be imprisoned, and anybody who promulgates it should be either imprisoned or added, at the very least, to the sex offenders registry. And so they’re pretty explicitly coming for creators, for teachers, librarians, and even social media sites that have allowed us common places to meet.
V.V. Ganeshananthan: So I just want to pause here and say thank you so much for that very thorough answer, and a lot of what you’ve mentioned are things that we’ve touched on in previous episodes. So just to remind our listeners, if you check our show notes, we’ll flag some of those previous episodes for you, including the ones with librarians, ones talking about how queer writers, Black writers, writers of color, have been specifically targeted, and also writing about sex. So we’ve had a number of fantastic guests on to talk about some of those things, and also Rachel Bitecofer, who was the first person on our show to talk about Project 2025.
When did you and Authors Against Book Bans become aware of the ways that Project 2025 might affect the LGBTQ community And how did you kind of start looking into this?
MTH: We started the way that book banners usually don’t: We read the book. We heard that there was this free book available on the internet that outlined the goals for the next Trump administration. And, you know, I heard that, and I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to read that one bit, but know thine enemy.” And so I picked it up, and you literally only get five pages in… I mean, it’s extreme from page one, but you only get five pages in before, as an author, you look at it and go, “Oh, I see they’re coming for us.”
So our explainers that we had put out about Project 2025, were, I hope, not meant to eclipse the other extreme policies that are outlined in that 900-page book. The plans for mass deportation are really what keep me up at night the most. But as Authors Against Book Bans, we know who our people are, and our people are book people, and we wanted to be really clear with everybody who is a member, and all of the people who love our members and are in community with our members that there are specific and extreme plans for us outlined in this policy.
WT: Yeah. I want to circle back around to that. I haven’t read the book, by the way, so that’s why you’re here to explain things to us that we have not ourselves read. I did read your quotes from it that you’ve put on Bluesky and that were in the article on Lithub. And in the book Project 2025 they use the word pornography, right? And then you post a translation, right? So most people think when somebody says, “We want to ban pornography,” first of all, First Amendment problem there, in and of itself, right? And I don’t think it will be popular, but most people think it’s Pornhub that they’re going to ban, but really it’s Lithub, right? And you’re translating that the way that they’re defining pornography means that most books that have what they would define as pornographic, sexual content, or even subject or thematic ideas would be banned. Could you explain how you’re getting to that? Unpack their definition of pornography for us.
MTH: I would love to. So, some of the books that have been labeled as pornographic because of their content are things like And Tango Makes Three, the picture book about the two gay penguins who fell in love in the New York Public Zoo that is meant for our youngest readers. I don’t mean to offer any spoilers to that book, but there’s no on-the-page sex in And Tango Makes Three. It is a very wholesome recounting of how two male penguins at a zoo nurtured rocks until they were given an egg to care for, and the egg was named Tango. It’s just a sweet little family story. So that’s the kind of books that fall under this porn label. And we know that because there are laws in places like Iowa, the “Don’t Say Gay” law, pretty famously creates a law environment where all LGBTQ+ material, including things as wholesome as And Tango Makes Three [are banned].I should be clear, though, I believe that even the most explicit on-the-page sexual depictions belong in the world.
WT: Which has been the rule in the United States ever since, really, the trials around James Joyce’s Ulysses, which we did an episode on as well, which we’ll link to. That was a very famous case about what is and is not obscenity. And they’re basically like, hey, not this.
MTH: Yeah, I am of the mind that pornography should exist and that pornographers should not be put in jail. I am also of the mind that the people who create children’s literature about LGBTQ content are not creating pornography, and that, furthermore, there have already been safeguards put in place by experts who have been trained in media and how to siphon the correct age-appropriate media, to whom, like teachers and like librarians for decades and that they have been doing this work quietly and thanklessly, and that they do not require further oversight about what is and is not appropriate. In fact, I tend to find that the gatekeepers tend to be even more conservative than I think a lot of readers wish they would be.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photograph of Maggie Tokuda-Hall by Red Scott.
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The Worst Ronin • The Siren, the Song, and the Spy • The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea • Love in the Library • Squad
Others:
Authors Against Book Bans • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, Episode 13: “Censoring the American Canon: Farah Jasmine Griffin on Book Bans Targeting Black Writers” • “The Republicans’ Project 2025 is Disastrous For Books,” by James Folta | LitHub • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, Episode 12: “Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex” • Alex DiFrancesco’s resignation from Jessica Kingsley Publishers • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 52: “Brooklyn Public Library’s Leigh Hurwitz on Helping Young People Resist Censorship” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4, Episode 20: “Adam Serwer on Critical Race Theory and the Very American Fear of Owning Up to Our Racist Past and Present” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 22: “Rachel Bitecofer on Democratic Strategies to Counter Republicans in the 2024 Election” • And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell, and Henry Cole • Idaho House Bill No. 710 • Iowa Senate File 496 • Book Bans | PEN America • Kimberlé Crenshaw