Civil rights advocates and students in Massachusetts are raising alarm after a plainclothes police officer searched an 8th grade classroom for the memoir Gender Queer, a book with LGBT+ narratives that’s frequently a target of right-wing book banning efforts.
On 8 December, an officer with the Great Barrington Police Department entered WEB Du Bois Regional Middle School looking for the book, following up on an anonymous complaint to the department that the book contained obscene or pornographic materials.
