'Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn' is a target of Texas book bans. Why? Good old-fashioned transphobia

Daily Kos
Laura Clawson, Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday, October 31, 2023 at 11:54:40a MPST

What do you do if you’re a bigot who lives to ban books about groups you don’t like, but all the books about actual LGBTQ+ characters have already been banned? You move on to banning any book that is about aspiration or being true to yourself no matter what other people say—or even books about straight-up make-believe.

“Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn” is a picture book for young children about a kitty who wears a horn tied to her head, wishing she could be a unicorn—and then becomes best friends with a unicorn who wears a pair of kitty ears because he thinks cats are great. Obviously, obviously, in the year 2023, this is controversial. Because a colorfully illustrated story can’t just be about having friends who support you, or about learning that the friend you aspire to be more like also admires you and wishes they had something you have. Nope. According to the book-banner’s creed, this book must secretly be trying to make kids trans.

Controversies about “Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn” have come up in two Texas cities so far this year. In Abilene, the story has a happy ending: Despite objections, the city council approved a “Kitty-Corn” statue to be included in a storybook garden.

“It’s not innocent,” local resident Tammy Fogle told the Visual Arts Jury considering the statue. “It’s not based on facts. So why would we want to be a part of something that promotes misleading our children to believe there is something wrong with the way God made them?”

I could be wrong here, but I’m just going to bet that Fogle has no problem with little Texan girls dressing up as princesses, despite being commoners in a nation with no royalty. I’d bet she’s fine with little boys dressing up as astronauts when they will never go into space. She may even not see a problem with kids dressing up as unicorns. But tell a story about a kitty who takes her unicorn dress-up into the territory of wishing she were a unicorn, and hoo boy, Tammy Fogle Is Not Having It.

According to one David Sprott, “There are many things that, as a society, we deem to be too mature for children, and this is one of them.” Again, we are talking about a talking pink kitty and a unicorn. If that’s your definition of excessively mature content, I don’t know what to say.

The book’s illustrator, LeUyen Pham, responded to the Abilene controversy by noting that “Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn” was not intended to be about gender identity. She wrote:

How could anyone read the book that [author] Shannon Hale and I had created together in any negative way? The story is about a little pink kitten that wishes she was a unicorn, only to meet a real unicorn who wishes he were a kitty, and hardly seems like something that could be a target for book banning. The idea of it seemed so preposterous to me that I was sure that any person who took three minutes to read this picture book would have to agree with me. Where is the harm in this sweet story? Why protest such a symbol of peace and kindness?

But Abilene isn’t the only place in Texas where people have gotten worked up over “Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn,” and the outcome was less positive in Katy. Over the summer, the Katy Independent School District halted all school library book purchases and had all the books that had already been ordered put in storage. One of the books reportedly cited in the board’s discussion of this plan was, yes, “Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn.”

Trustee Morgan Calhoun claimed that there are books in elementary schools that “support sexually alternative lifestyles.” Pressed about that claim on Facebook, Calhoun—in comments screenshotted and tweeted by a local parent—reportedly cited “a book located in our libraries called ‘Kitty Corn’ where the main character does want to transform into something they are obviously not.”

Calhoun seemingly wasn’t done. “The book does also use pronoun terminology in reference to ‘they’ instead of ‘he or she’, while talking about a single character,” she reportedly went on to claim, falsely.

While seemingly innocent pretend-play, there are multiple references through imagery in the book that some parents do feel as inappropriate and sexually suggestive for an elementary school student. It was actually a parent who made me aware of the book as her 7 year old checked it out. Is it sexually explicit? No, but the context of the book is questionable, which is why I brought it up.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this nonsense was allegedly part of the rationale for freezing all school library purchases in an entire school district.

As Pham, the illustrator, wrote about the Abilene controversy, “How the audience chooses to interpret a story speaks much more of the mind of the audience themselves than the mind of the artist.”