Who’s Afraid of Students Reading about Sex?

What’s the appropriate age for reading graphic novels that depict sex acts or contain frank discussions of sexuality and abuse?

That’s the question the Alberta government says it is asking with a new public feedback survey about the books stocked on public school library shelves.

But by singling out four graphic novels that have been subject to book-ban demands in Canada and the United States for their depiction of sexuality, trans identity and childhood sexual abuse, and by showing the public only the most graphic sections without any context, the exercise is a thinly veiled call for censorship, critics say.

On May 26 Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced the launch of a public feedback survey about Alberta’s lack of provincial school board strategy for selecting “age-appropriate books.”

The Tyee requested an interview with Nicolaides, but he was not made available. Instead his ministry emailed a statement to The Tyee on his behalf, saying the survey is open until June 6 to responses from anyone living in Alberta.

“We are aiming to implement new standards that reflect community input ahead of the next school year,” reads Nicolaides’ statement.

“At the same time, we are also engaging directly with school boards and education partners to understand how selection policies currently operate,” the statement says.

“Survey results will help shape consistent provincial standards for how school boards select and manage library materials that include sexual content in kindergarten to Grade 12 school libraries,” it continues.

In particular Nicolaides pointed to Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Blankets by Craig Thompson, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Flamer by Mike Curato, including a slide show that highlights only the sections depicting sex acts, sexuality, sexual abuse and gender identity exploration, on the survey web page.

Nicolaides told The Tyee these books were selected based on complaints from “multiple” parents that he received “late last year.”

But reporting by the Investigative Journalism Foundation revealed Nicolaides had met with social conservative “parents’ rights” groups campaigning to have those books and others removed from libraries across Canada.

Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has been criticized for passing legislation widely viewed as transphobic for requiring schools to notify parents when their child asks to go by different pronouns or names and limiting gender-affirming medical care access for youth under 16.

It has also made sexual health education available to students only if parents agree to opt in, as opposed to offering parents the opportunity to opt out as British Columbia does.

Nicolaides denied that his government’s focus on the four books cited, three of which are written by and about queer and/or trans people, was about banning books or “silencing diverse voices.”

“Every student deserves to see themselves represented in their school library materials. The criticism that this unfairly targets LGBTQ-themed books is not accurate and frankly irresponsible,” his statement read.

But the teachers and sexual health educator who spoke to The Tyee disagree, saying appropriate library curation prevents younger students from accessing materials with mature content, while allowing older students to safely explore ideas and themes around sexuality, gender identity and abuse, through books like these.

Some of the school libraries that stock the titles flagged by Nicolaides go from kindergarten to Grade 9 or Grade 12.

But educators who spoke with The Tyee say age-appropriate books exploring sexuality and gender are important for young people struggling with their identities or others’ reactions to their identities, or who know people who are trans or queer.

“To be able to engage with resources like that when it is their choice or there’s no parental objection can be illuminating, life-changing, identity-preserving. It’s extraordinary and I’ve seen that,” said Harold Semenuk, an Alberta teacher who works in a public school library and sits on the board of directors for the non-profit Canadian School Libraries.

In Alberta parents have the right to opt their children out of accessing certain books at school, Semenuk said. But they do not have the right to determine what other students in the school can access.

By opening up the public feedback survey to anyone in the province, the Alberta government is inviting people and organizations with homophobic, transphobic and anti-sex education agendas like Take Back Alberta to influence public education policy, said Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, who previously worked as an English teacher in Alberta.

How educators say policy should be developed

Unlike British Columbia’s public school system, where there are an estimated 700 teacher-librarians across 60 school districts, very few Alberta public school libraries are managed by teacher-librarians, who are educators trained to curate developmentally appropriate materials for all grade levels.

Semenuk, who previously headed the teachers’ union specialist council for teacher-librarians and teachers who work in libraries until it was shuttered last year due to low membership, estimates there are fewer than 10 teacher-librarians in the province.

“I’m probably the only person with a full-time library role, and I’m designated as a curriculum co-ordinator as well,” Semenuk told The Tyee.

Not every school has a staff person assigned to the library, or even has a library, he noted, pointing to district budget cuts as the reason.

In response Nicolaides noted the province invested an additional $1.1 billion in education funding in this year’s budget, an amount the Alberta Teachers’ Association criticized for being too low.

Semenuk said the Education Ministry has said only that these books are available in school libraries that serve a range of students in terms of their ages and maturity levels — not that students who are in primary or elementary grades are actually accessing age-inappropriate books.

Younger kids are typically escorted to and supervised by a teacher or staff member in the library, Semenuk pointed out.

“It’s not like we don’t navigate these challenges in public libraries, as well.”

Both Schilling and Semenuk agree school boards do need policy for navigating what books to have in the library and how to handle it when a parent challenges the presence of a book in a school library.

Which is why Schilling wants to see engagement on how schools curate their libraries with a more limited group of people than just anyone currently living in Alberta.

“If you’re going to create policies that affect school boards and schools, then you need to be having conversations with school boards, teachers, administrators, parents and trying to find the common ground that way,” he said.

Comparing BC and Alberta

Though calls to ban books in schools have quieted down in B.C. news, they are still happening, said Tammy Le, president of the BC Teacher-Librarians’ Association, a professional association under the BC Teachers’ Federation.

“A lot of them have been resolved at the school level and haven’t been escalated,” Le said, adding most books remained in the library.

Le said books that explore incidents or themes around racism, or that are written by Indigenous, Black or other authors of colour, also tend, alongside books with LGBTQ+ content, to face challenges.

In her experience as a teacher-librarian in a Surrey secondary school, Le said, books that depict violence are much less likely to be subjected to parents’ or outsiders’ complaints.

“I have not heard of any parent complaining about The Walking Dead, for example,” said Le, referencing the graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman about survivors in a zombie apocalypse — later made into a TV show — that is available to students at some secondary school libraries.

“It is very graphic, and that’s a choice selection. So not every student will read it. But then you talk to some of the students, they’re watching The Walking Dead.”

That reflects our societal norms around sex and violence, Le said, adding countries like France view teenagers’ exposure to media featuring nudity, for example, as more normal than Canada or the United States does.

In Canada and the United States, Le said, “we would rather our kids watch violence than watch a sex scene.”

Talking sex vs. watching porn

B.C. sexual health educator Saleema Noon agrees that books with sex scenes or scenes of assault or molestation like the ones depicted in Fun Home, Blankets, Flamer and Gender Queer are not appropriate for students in Grade 7 and younger.

“But for teenagers, these books address a lot of questions they have, experiences they’ve had, things they hear from their peers and media, in a way that resonates with them,” said Noon.

The depictions in these books are different from pornography, which many kids have been exposed to online from an early age, Noon noted.

“Pornography is entertainment, whereas these books are meant to be educational. We also know that pornography has the intent of eliciting sexual arousal, whereas these books do not,” Noon said.

“Something that sexualizes children is something that’s exploitative, that encourages them to do something that is unsafe, is uncomfortable or is against the law. It also places young people in a position where they’re seen as a sexual object.”

From what Noon saw of the consensual sex acts in the books in question from the panels highlighted by Alberta’s Education Ministry, they do not sexualize young people, she said.

“What I saw was peer to peer,” she said. “Sexualization was not something that came to mind.”

But Noon draws the line at books that depict or allude to child sexual abuse, as both Fun Home and Blankets do.

“No book referencing child abuse or child sexualization belongs in a school library... or anywhere,” she told The Tyee in a followup email.

The age of consent for sexual activity in Canada is 16, meaning many secondary school students can legally consent to sex under specific circumstances.

But that doesn’t stop the Alberta government from questioning whether books with sexual content belong in their school libraries.

“We recognize that while youth aged 16 and older can legally consent to sexual activity, this does not automatically mean all depictions of sexual content are appropriate for a school library setting,” Nicolaides wrote in his statement to The Tyee.

“Parents should have a say in these decisions, and students deserve access to library materials that challenge and inspire them without crossing the line into inappropriate content.”

In B.C. the average age for initial sexual activity for teenagers is 17, Noon said.

The McCreary Centre Society’s annual Adolescent Health Survey found in 2023, the most recent data available, that of the 16 per cent of respondents who had had sexual intercourse, most experienced their first time at 15 or 16 years old.

But exposure to pornography starts at a younger age, Noon said. “It would be rare for them not to have been exposed to some kind of sexualized content” like porn by the time they start having sex, she said.

“The reality is our kids are exposed to so much more at younger and younger ages. They’re craving scientific information and honest answers to their questions,” Noon said. “And books like this can provide that for them.”

From a health, safety and emotional perspective, young people need exposure to sexual content that is designed not to titillate but to inform, before they start having sex, Noon said.

While graphic novels aren’t a replacement for sexual health education, they can be a developmentally appropriate introduction to these themes for teenagers.

“While these books in some ways are graphic, they provide information in a way that resonates with young people,” Noon said.

Parents also play a role in teaching their kids values and boundaries around sexuality and sexual health, Noon added.

“Sexual education needs time, care and attention, and open conversations between adults and their kids,” she said.

Parents should be concerned with what their kids are doing online, what apps they’re using, who they’re communicating with and if they have their phones in their bedrooms, Noon said.

“Are they being sextorted? Has anyone ever asked to send them a nude?” she asked.

Whether their teenager is reading a sex scene in a book is the least of a parent’s worries about their kids today, Noon said.