A Nashville area The school district voted this week to remove a book about transgender children from its school libraries after questions were raised about the book's content at a board meeting last month.
During the public comment section of the Dec. 10 Murfreesboro City School Board meeting, the pastor and activist John K. Amanshuku The district called for the picture book, “It's Okay to Be Yourself,” to be placed on shelves at Bradley Academy, an elementary school serving pre-K through sixth grade students in the district.
The book introduces the concept of gender identity to readers as young as four years old, according to his description.
“Some people are boys. Some people are girls. Some people are neither, or both, or somewhere in between,” she says.
A school in Tennessee voted Tuesday to remove a book for transgender children from its library shelves. (Getty Images)
The book tells the story of Ruthie, a transgender girl, and introduces terms such as cisgender and non-binary to explain different gender identities to younger readers.
After Amanchukwu began reading from the book, Board President Butch Campbell objected to the pastor bringing up the book at the meeting, saying it was against the rules of only bringing up agenda items during the public comment section.
pastor I continued reading From inside the book, he described the book's message about the existence of more than two genders as a “lie” and cited the Book of Genesis.
After about two minutes of the board trying to get Amanchukwu to stop speaking, they forced the meeting to stop.
North Carolina Pastor John Amanchukwu previously spoke at a Wake County School Board meeting. (Wake County School Board/screenshot)
In the January 14 School Board Meeting this weekThe board announced that the transgender-themed book had been reviewed by a committee of staff and parents, and they recommended the book be removed.
The book has been on shelves since 2022 and has never been pulled, a board member said.
Before the vote took place, Vice President Amanda Moore accused Amanchukwu of running a “show” to draw the book's attention to the region.
Amanchukwu is a contributor to Turning Point USA and travels around the country attending various school board meetings to bring attention to explicit books in school libraries.
“This person had announced his visit for weeks before he came. He never called the school, he never called the central office, he never called this board, even though he came and yelled at us about this dangerous book we had on the shelf.” President Amanda Moore said before the board voted to remove the book from library shelves.
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A child reads a book at the Santa Clarita City Public Library's Valencia branch in Santa Clarita, California, United States, on Sunday, November 1, 2015. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Amanchukwu responded to the board's decision and comments in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“If my commitment to protecting children from content that mentally rapes them is an ‘offer’… I pray that this ‘offer’ will become even greater for the least of these, in 2025,” Amanchukwu said.
He quoted Proverbs 22:6, which says: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
His statement continued: “We are called to train children, not to tamper with them.” “I applaud the board members for using common sense in managing pedagogy for students in Murfreesboro City Schools.”
This month, a school in Minnesota removed a book about transgender people from an elementary school library after facing pressure from a concerned parent.
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