The Queen Bees of Tybee County: A Parent's Review 

Re: Cobb County Schools Should Not Introduce Children to Drag Queen Story Hour

I am writing about the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. As you know, the HRRB is a reading competition where teams from various schools read a list of books and compete against each other on trivia-style questions about the books. This year, one of the selections for the middle grades book list is The Queen Bees of Tybee County, by Kyle Casey Chu. The story is written by a self-described “drag queen” and is, in effect, an iteration of the phenomenon known as “Drag Queen Story Hour” in the form of a young adult novel.

As a Cobb County parent, I believe the County should re-evaluate its participation in the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl if this is the type of material the Bowl seeks to give our children. I’ve read the book and researched the committee that selected it. I have a lot to say. But here is the “TL; DR” summary of my concerns:

The Queen Bees of Tybee County is not merely a mediocre children’s novel that happens to feature a boy who experiments with drag. Its central message is that “drag” is an essential and immutable part of a child’s identity, that others have a moral obligation to affirm that identity, and that traditional understandings of sex, gender, Christianity, and parental authority should yield when they conflict with it.

That message is consistent with the author’s own background. Kyle Casey Chu, identified on the book’s dust jacket as one of the “founding queens” of Drag Queen Story Hour, says he is now using his platform to tell “even gayer stories.” DQSH openly describes its mission as challenging traditional gender roles and teaching children that conventional distinctions between “girl” and “boy” clothing and toys should not constrain them.

The book advances this philosophy directly. Derrick’s grandmother tells him that his attraction to drag is “who you’ve always been” and “won’t change”; Derrick concludes that “drag is a part of me” and that he “need[s] it.” Characters suggest that anyone who does not affirm someone’s “queerness” is unfit for friendship. Christianity is reduced to a caricature and serves as the story’s principal source of opposition. Finally, Derrick’s biological sex is treated as irrelevant when he enters a girls’ pageant.

The book’s selection is entirely consistent with the scholarly commitments of those who selected it. The Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature, which hosts the book award from which the HRRB reading lists are drawn, has repeatedly featured presentations on “queering” children’s literature, queer theory, LGBTQ identities, and “Queering the Preschool-Primary Classroom Library.” The selection committee’s faculty co-chair has likewise published scholarship advocating “queertopian” children’s literature.

The issue is therefore not whether children should be taught kindness toward people who are different. It is whether Cobb County should use a school-sponsored reading competition to promote a particular philosophy of gender and identity with which many families disagree. With the arguments below, I urge that it should not.

The Author and Drag Queen Story Hour

According to the book’s dust jacket, author Kyle Casey Chu is “one of the founding queens of Drag Queen Story Hour.” Because “far-right extremists stormed” his Drag Story Hour in 2022, he now has committed himself to telling “even gayer stories.”

The organization Drag Queen Story Hour is not shy about its mission: to teach children an ideology of challenging gender roles.[1] It is also quite candid in explaining its intended role in public schools. The website dismisses any parental concerns about including drag-related curriculum in schools as a false narrative manufactured by “Koch-funded organizations,”[2] and encourages parents to “push back against conservative narratives that frame decisions about what is taught in schools as some unseen indoctrination process.”[3]

That background is relevant because the book’s treatment of gender closely parallels the educational philosophy DQSH describes in its own materials. This is not a neutral story about a boy who discovers drag culture. Rather, it is Mr. Chu’s continuing project of introducing drag culture, and all it entails, to children. And according to DQSH, anyone who challenges this agenda can be preemptively dismissed as “rooted in homophobia and transphobia.” This is an attempt to immunize the organization’s educational claims from criticism by framing skepticism itself as evidence of bigotry.

The Book

The book, The Queen Bees of Tybee County, is a young adult novel about a middle-school-aged boy, Derrick, who comes to identify as a gay drag performer over the course of a summer spent with his grandmother. I will discuss the book’s central premise and apparent objective, but first let’s look at its literary merit.

The Book: Clearly a “3/5,” or Worse.

The Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl forms its middle grades reading list from the Georgia Children’s Book Award’s finalist list. Because the award is a project of the University of Georgia’s School of Education, I was able to obtain records concerning the book’s selection through Georgia Open Records requests.

Even setting aside my disagreements with the story’s thematic message, QBTC is mediocre literature at best. Indeed, the Georgia Children’s Book Awards committee’s own records provide some support for that assessment: the committee member who initially evaluated the book gave it only 3/5 for “literary quality” on the committee’s evaluation rubric.[4] Although that rating does not by itself establish the committee’s final judgment, it is hardly evidence that the book was selected because of exceptional literary merit.

And after reading the book myself, I can agree with the poor evaluation. The book’s most obvious literary weakness is its failure to create an authentic sense of place. Although QBTC has been promoted as a Georgia story, its connections to the state are largely superficial references to things such as fried green tomatoes and peach cobbler. The fictional town of Heritage, Tybee County, is equally difficult to locate. The story provides no meaningful geographic or cultural details that would establish whether Heritage is in the Coastal Plain, Piedmont, mountains, or elsewhere in Georgia. At various points, the setting seems to require contradictory geography. The result is a fictional Georgia that could just as easily be almost any rural town in America.

This lack of place is particularly unfortunate because the novel purports to explore questions of cultural identity and a community’s response to racial and gender minorities. Georgia’s distinct regions have their own histories, cultures, and demographics, yet QBTC largely ignores them. Instead, “Heritage” functions as a generic backdrop against which the author constructs a critique of “traditionalism.”

The characterization is similarly heavy-handed. We are repeatedly told that Derrick’s grandmother, herself the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a cultural outsider, yet virtually everything we see suggests that she is a respected and well-integrated member of the community: children visit her unannounced, her food is celebrated at community events, she helps produce a major town celebration, and she is close friends with the county sheriff. Likewise, we are repeatedly told that Heritage is “traditional,” but the book provides surprisingly little evidence of what that means in practice.

In short, the book frequently tells readers what to think rather than shows them. The committee’s 3/5 literary-quality evaluation therefore deserves consideration. Whatever ultimately motivated the committee’s selection, the available records provide little evidence that QBTC was chosen because it represents an outstanding example of literary craftsmanship. Its thematic message, by contrast, is unmistakably prominent—and deserves scrutiny when considering whether it belongs on a school-sponsored reading list.

Didactic Lessons in Drag

While the poor quality of the story is bad enough, the messages it sends are worse. QBTC is not a story that simply encourages children to understand and be kind to other children who might be different. Rather, the main theme of QBTC is that anything short of complete and enthusiastic acceptance of “drag” children is morally unacceptable. Mr. Chu accomplishes this by portraying drag as an “identity” rather than a performance, showing acceptance as morally required and disagreement as harmful and illegitimate, denigrating Christians and Christian traditions, treating sex and gender distinctions as irrelevant, and validating retaliation against anyone who disagrees.

What is Drag?

Traditionally understood (as much as one can “traditionally” understand something like drag), “drag” is a theatrical performance in which male performers deliberately exaggerate or parody characteristics conventionally associated with women, typically through clothing, makeup, hairstyles, speech, mannerisms, and other forms of stylized presentation. As Darel E. Paul explains, the tradition is closely associated with “camp,” an aesthetic characterized by artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and gender parody. Drag also relies heavily on sexual vulgarity. Today, drag is celebrated for subverting masculinity while lampooning femininity, and ultimately erasing both.[5]

But Mr. Chu takes drag beyond performance. When Derrick’s grandmother finds him dressing in women’s clothes, she does not simply tell him that he has always enjoyed dressing that way. Rather, she assures him that “It’s who you’ve always been,” and proceeds to show him a photo album with pictures of him as a toddler donning women’s clothing. She later tells him his inclinations towards drag “won’t change” and that “It’s the truth” about who he is. Derrick adopts this mentality, stating: “I know I’m queer, and I know that isn’t going to change. And I know that drag is a part of me. I need it.” He says he is “incomplete” without drag. “Because this . . . drag . . . is an important part of who I am.”

In other words, drag, in QBTC, is not a performance that may help Derrick or others express something about their identity—it is itself an immutable and innate identity. I am by no means an expert or student of drag culture, but this formation of drag as an “identity” rather than a “performance” goes well beyond any characterization of drag—critical or supportive—I’ve found in my research for this analysis.

This shift from performance to identity is particularly troublesome when presented to young, impressionable readers. In modern identity politics, critiques of “identity” are treated as presumptively invalid because, the argument goes, they attack a person rather than an idea. Attacks on people or identities, then, can easily be dismissed as bigoted or, in the words of the organization Mr. Chu takes credit for, “transphobic” and “homophobic.”

The book teaches children that there is no room for skepticism about its gender claims. Unlike a critique of a performance style, which can be framed in terms of aesthetics, philosophy, or ideas, a critique of “drag” as an identity is off limits because you are, according to Mr. Chu and others like him, attacking a person. The book’s apparent goal is to inoculate children while they are young from healthy skepticism or independent thinking with respect to “drag” culture and the specific philosophy of gender it entails.

Skepticism is Immoral

Having established “drag” as an identity, Mr. Chu goes on to illustrate to children how they must shame, ridicule, and exclude anyone who does not fully support a person’s gender confusion.

Throughout the book, Mr. Chu gives children scripts for dealing with anyone who may be skeptical of “drag” or any iteration of an LGBTQ+ identity. Before Derrick himself decides he is gay, another new friend comes out to him. Derrick’s initial reaction is one of surprise—not because he disagrees, but simply because he has never known a “gay kid” before. But this lack of complete and enthusiastic acceptance on Derrick’s part immediately marks him as “dangerous” to the gay friend. Another friend tells him, “if you aren’t going to be cool about it, […] then you can go find new friends.” In other words, rather than treating this as an opportunity for conversation or understanding, the response is immediate social separation.

Later, after Derrick comes to decide that he, too, is gay, he and the friend discuss what might happen if Derrick’s friend and love interest back home finds out. The friend tells Derrick that someone who doesn’t accept his “queerness” is “probably not friend material,” and that “Anyone who doesn’t accept you for who you are” fails the criteria for friendship. Put more bluntly, if someone doesn’t accept Derrick’s identity, “Then…well…that guy sucks.”

In other words, the book teaches children that a good friend must affirm someone’s identity, and rejection or disagreement disqualifies someone from friendship. Is this how we want children in our schools to handle their differences?

Christians and Christianity are the Problem

Throughout the book, there are several representations of Christians and Christian symbols. But in keeping with Mr. Chu’s failure to do anything more than scratch the cultural surface of his contrived setting, Christianity and Christian concepts are little more than cliché symbols of traditionalism. Christianity is never presented in a good light, and there is no real discussion of Christianity as a cultural reality in Georgia or what Christian teaching would have to say about the gender confusion Mr. Chu introduces to children. Instead, Christianity is simply Mr. Chu’s derided symbol for traditionalism.

But before looking at how the novel portrays Christianity in a negative light, it’s worth examining one of the first references to Christianity in the book. In the first few pages, during a scene where boys are changing in a locker room after a basketball game, Derrick notices his love interest’s “lucky cross necklace.” I suspect Mr. Chu’s description of the Cross as “lucky,” as if it were a rabbit’s foot, comes more so from a place of ignorance than malice. Anyone with a passing familiarity of the Cross or its significance in Christianity would know that such a characterization comes across as trivializing, or worse. Mr. Chu’s mishandling of the Cross early in the book brings his later strawman attacks on faith into focus.

Earlier I critiqued Mr. Chu for never showing how Heritage embodied “traditionalism.” Perhaps the one exception would be the story’s primary villain: a “church lady” whose daughter used to be best friends with one of Derrick’s newfound friends until her mother encouraged her to hang out with the town’s Mean Girls and adhere to traditional femininity.  But other than being a flat stand-in for Christianity, the church lady never presents an actual Christian belief or perspective. Rather, at the story’s climax, she simply demands that Derrick cannot compete in drag in the town’s beauty pageant because he is a boy. She never really explains why, and she never articulates a counterpoint to the one Mr. Chu wants to teach our children. Even so, the grandmother chastises the church lady: “Don’t you try to use our faith as an excuse for your behavior!” The message is clear: any traditional understanding of gender, even ones based on faith, are presumptively invalid and should be treated as such.

The book does not merely disagree with traditional Christian norms—indeed, it never really gives them a fair presentation in the first place. Rather, the book repeatedly associates traditionalism and Christianity with rigidity, stuffiness, meanness, and exclusion, while associating gender nonconformity with authenticity, courage, friendship, and liberation. Christianity, then, is reduced to a symbol of ignorance by an author who himself appears ignorant of its tenets and symbols. Setting aside which side of the debate is correct, should we, as a school community, trust Mr. Chu to present such a complicated issue to our children if he is not even willing to give a fair, informed, or nuanced representation of competing viewpoints?

Biological Sex Is Irrelevant

The central conflict and climax of QBTC involves a biological male competing in a pageant specifically designed for girls. While the pageant itself does not necessarily involve athleticism or competitions based on physical ability, we cannot read the book, which was published in 2025, in a cultural vacuum. The book has as much to say about men in women’s spaces as it does about boys putting on eyeliner.

The erasure of gender distinctives in QBTC is subtle but present. One particularly troubling episode occurs during an interaction between Derrick and the Mean Girls shortly after he has come to accept his “drag” identity. After some insults are traded, the children raise their voices at each other and Derrick feels a strong urge to actually fight the girls. In any other literary context where a male feels the urge to physically fight a female, one would expect some deep soul searching about what it means to be a man, how to constructively channel masculine rage, and the responsibilities and obligations men have towards women. But of course, none of that makes sense in a world where gender does not matter. After all, because Derrick has now accepted his “drag” identity, he is simply one of “the girls” and his spark of rage is valid.

And amazingly, the majority of the girls Derrick intends to compete against quickly slip into this same mindset once Derrick reveals his intent to compete. They immediately, without explanation, start referring to him with feminine pronouns: “She is a Bee, just like the rest of us.” And perhaps more surprisingly, once Derrick is “out” in drag, he apparently is free to undress and change his outfits backstage among girls—very young, biological girls—without anyone posing any questions or concerns.

Again, Mr. Chu’s novel comes during a time of intense cultural debate about biological reality and what it means for competitive spaces, changing rooms, and pronouns. The narrative resolves these conflicts simply by changing the character’s pronouns and treating biological sex as irrelevant. Once Derrick is recognized as a girl, the fact that he is biologically male is treated as irrelevant to his eligibility for a female-only competition or presence in a female-only changing space.

Resistance Justifies Retaliation

One of the more troubling themes of QBTC—and one that makes it a particularly poor recommendation for school children—is that resistance to affirming any subjective sense of gender is treated as moral grounds for retaliation. For instance, the aforementioned Mean Girls say mean girl things to Derrick’s new female friend because she is not sufficiently feminine. The daughter escalates the exchange of words to a physical conflict by throwing juice in the girls’ faces. Predictably, she gets put in detention. But, according to Mr. Chu, this is not a moment for self-reflection or asking whether the response was appropriate. Rather, after the daughter recounts the story to Derrick and their friend, Derrick simply says “That’s messed up,” while the friend claps in admiration. The friend then shares that the Mean Girls also started rumors about him before he was “out,” and how he and the juice-thrower got payback against the Mean Girls: they sabotaged their yearbook photos. This is all portrayed as a perfectly acceptable way to deal with disagreement—the book never engages seriously with whether these retaliatory actions are appropriate. The novel treats retaliatory humiliation and physical aggression as justified responses to interpersonal hostility: if someone does not affirm you, they are fair game for social rejection and retaliation.

Undermining Parental Authority

How is Derrick able to explore his gender identity so freely in a setting that is, presumably, so stuffy and rigid? In the story, it is his grandmother who primarily enables and encourages his exploration into drag. And she does so, explicitly, against Derrick’s father’s wishes.

During the revelation that Derrick was, apparently, “born that way” and was into dressing in women’s clothing even as a toddler, we are told that Derrick’s father put his foot down and refused to let his mother or grandmother indulge him in this practice. The grandmother, though, refuses to respect this boundary as she cares for Derrick over the summer.

The book, then, creates a conflict between parental authority and automatic affirmation of gender expression. The book clearly accepts the latter as the prevailing interest. The grandmother doesn’t merely encourage Derrick to express himself. She tells him what his behavior means, insists that it is an enduring part of him, and overrides his father’s contrary wishes.

This is not a message our schools should be endorsing to children. Schools should partner with parents rather than undermining their authority.

What Does QBTC Teach Our Children to Believe?

In sum, QBTC teaches our children:

·       “Drag” is an immutable identity—not a performance;

·       Affirming “drag” or gender non-conformity is a moral obligation;

·       Biological sex is irrelevant;

·       Parental authority can be ignored; and

·       Skepticism should be immediately rejected, ridiculed, and punished.

The book therefore goes considerably beyond teaching children to treat people who are different with kindness. It presents a particular philosophy of identity, gender, and social relationships: that gender-related self-conception is an enduring truth about the individual, that authentic self-expression requires others’ affirmation, and that traditional sex-based and religious norms should yield when they conflict with that self-conception.

Is this Part of an “Agenda”?

So now that we know what QBTC is all about, let’s look at who decided this was an appropriate book for children, particularly as one of the selections for the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl.

The Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl selects its books for the annual competition from the nomination lists for various children’s book awards, depending on the age and grade level. The HRRB books for middle schoolers (grades 6-8) come from the nomination list for the Georgia Children’s Book Award.[6]

The Georgia Children’s Book Award is awarded by the University of Georgia Mary Frances Early College of Education. According to the College’s website, “The purpose of the award is to foster a love of reading in the children of Georgia and to introduce them to books of literary excellence. The annual award is given in two categories: picture books and middle-grade books. The selection process involves teachers, school library media specialists, public librarians, and tens of thousands of youth from across the state.”[7] Importantly, “[t]he book awards are closely connected to the annual Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature.”

The Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature: A Focus on “Queering” Children’s Literature

The Book Awards are announced at, and connected to, the Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature, and the HRRB finals take place during the conference.[8]

The conference often features topics specifically focused on “queering” children’s literature.

In 2025, one conference presentation entitled “Queer Futurity in Picturebooks: Breaking Out of Nuclear Family Depictions to Create More Inclusive Children’s Literature for Single Parent Families” promised to examine “family representation in picturebooks through a queer theoretical lens.”[9]

2024 included a presentation for K-5 teachers to learn about “continued trends to censor the reading of diverse books” entitled “‘I have something to say’: Reading Latinx Banned Books with Young Children.”[10]

The 2023 conference included a presentation entitled “LGBTQ+ Themes in Children’s Literature and Why to Include Them in a Collection.”[11] From the presentation slides, it appears that this presentation encouraged teachers to discuss a variety of “gender identities” with children, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and the ever-present “plus” of “two-spirit, pansexual, demisexual, genderfluid, etc.”:[12] Another slide features the “gender unicorn.”

And as if one such presentation was not enough, the conference, in the same year, included a second presentation for younger readers: “Queering the Preschool-Primary Classroom Library.”[13]

Taken together, these presentations suggest that the Georgia Conference on Children’s Literature does more than simply recognize the existence of LGBTQ characters or themes in children’s books. A recurring pedagogical approach at the conference is to use children’s literature to “queer” traditional understandings of gender, sexuality, and family. The terminology is significant. Presentations have expressly encouraged teachers to examine children’s literature through “queer theory,” to “queer” preschool and primary classroom libraries, and to introduce young children to an expanding range of gender and sexual identities. The 2025 presentation on “Queer Futurity,” for example, proposed moving beyond traditional depictions of the nuclear family, while the 2023 presentations explicitly addressed LGBTQ themes, gender identities, and “queering” classroom libraries for even the youngest students. Thus, the relevant question is not merely whether the conference includes books featuring LGBTQ characters. Its programming reflects a broader educational goal in which children’s literature is viewed as a means of subverting traditional views about gender, sexuality, family, and social norms. The conference agendas show us the educational framework within which the Book Award selections are being made.

Against this backdrop, the themes in QBTC—particularly its presentation of drag as an essential identity and its treatment of biological sex as irrelevant to participation in a girls’ pageant—are not isolated features of an otherwise ideologically neutral story. They are consistent with the broader pedagogical objective reflected in the conference programming.

The Book Award Committee: Committed to “Queertopia!”

It’s concerning enough that the Book Awards are presented at a conference where presentations on teaching “queer theory” to children are an annual occurrence. But the ideology does not stop there, and is represented within the Award’s selection committee itself. The available records do not tell us precisely why the committee selected the book. But they do allow us to evaluate the context in which that selection was made—and that context makes the selection far less surprising.

The Faculty Co-Chair of the Committee that selected QBTC is Dr. Katie Sciurba, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Department of Language and Literacy Education.[14] According to her Google Scholar page, Dr. Sciurba’s second-most cited scholarly article is entitled Flowers, Dancing, Dresses, and Dolls: Picture Book Representations of Gender-Variant Males. The abstract of the article states:

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine picture book representations of gender variance, as exhibited by male characters, in order to determine the books’ potential for exploring issues of social justice with elementary-age students. This study utilizes a critical multiculturalist lens to challenge the ways in which gender variance is represented in children’s literature and the reasons that young gender-variant male protagonists achieve—or do not achieve—communal acceptance.[15]

More recently, Dr. Sciurba has co-authored (with Kris Bell) an article entitled Mermaids, Abuelas, and Fairy Wings: Jessica Love’s Julián and the Making of a Queertopia. According to the abstract,

The authors use critical multicultural analysis informed by queer theory to examine the elements of Jessica Love’s Julián is a Mermaid (2019) and Julián at the Wedding (2021) that give rise to a queertopia—a world where one’s gender expression(s) and sexual identification(s) are not differences to be tolerated but sources of joy, community, and connection. As such, these two picturebooks disrupt cisheteronormative tropes frequently identified in children’s literature intended to represent LGBTQ+ youth and (re)imagine future, and present, possibilities for gender creative young people (of color).[16]

Dr. Sciurba’s article concludes with an “Implications for Educators” section, where she acknowledges that “some educators express concerns about the appropriateness of representing non-cisheterosexual identities in the ELA classroom” and “[m]any non-educators clearly share this resistance…”[17] She then lists several strategies for teachers to use “queer-inclusive” and “queertopian” texts despite these concerns and resistance.

Dr. Sciurba is also an editor of the Journal of Children’s Literature. Interestingly, one featured article on the Journal’s website is entitled “Teaching Challenged Texts: The Prince and the Dressmaker.” In a callout at the beginning of the article, the authors state:

This teacher collective saw and reacted to the conservative forces that have increased the persistent vitriol foisted on books written by and about marginalized communities. We saw the attempts to remove books that students were actively engaged with and learning from as a direct attack on the teaching profession. As a response we developed a set of teaching guides to help teachers center banned and challenged books - not because of these challenges, rather because these books deserve to be centered in the curriculum.[18]

The article then goes on to propose a lesson plan for teaching The Prince and the Dressmaker, a book dealing with topics such as “drag, cross dressing, [and] questioning gender roles,” and goes so far as to include student discussion questions about the main character’s fear that his father will not approve of the character’s cross dressing.[19]

Taken together, Dr. Sciurba’s scholarship and editorial work provide important context for the selection of QBTC. Her academic work explicitly examines children’s literature through queer frameworks, seeks to promote texts that affirm gender variance and queer identity, and addresses educators on how to overcome “resistance” to such texts. That philosophy is remarkably consistent with QBTC, whose central message similarly treats gender nonconformity and drag as essential expressions of identity while portraying resistance to those ideas as something to be overcome. The concern, therefore, is not that Dr. Sciurba has an academic interest in these subjects; she is entitled to pursue whatever scholarly interests she wishes. The concern is that a pedagogical philosophy which places parents among the ‘non-educators,’ and whose resistance educators are encouraged to overcome, is poorly suited to a public educational system in which parents retain a legitimate interest in—and responsibility for—the moral and cultural formation of their children. The selection of QBTC is consequently not surprising; it is precisely the sort of book one would expect from a committee operating within this educational philosophy.[20]

Conclusion: Should Cobb County Invite Drag Queen Story Hour Into Its Schools?

So what can we conclude about The Queen Bees of Tybee County? Is this an example of excellent children’s literature that should be presented to children participating in the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl?

No. The question is not whether the book has a right to exist, or whether children should ever encounter its ideas. The question is whether Cobb County should use a school-sponsored program to select and promote it as one of the books children are expected to read and master in competition.

I am not asking Cobb County to determine whether drag, gender identity, or LGBTQ identities are good or bad. I am asking the Board to recognize that QBTC advances a particular position on those contested questions and that the book is being presented through a school-sponsored extracurricular activity to children in grades 6–8. Parents should not be required to choose between allowing their children to participate in a beloved reading program and acquiescing to a set of ideological propositions they do not share.

Mr. Chu is going to write what he wants to write. Dr. Sciurba is going to teach what she wants to teach. HRRB’s decision to entrust its book selection to people with such interests may reflect poor judgment on its part, but HRRB is not accountable to Cobb County families.[21]

That is why I am calling on the Board and Superintendent Ragsdale to make a sensible decision about Cobb County’s participation in the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. One option would be for the County to opt out of the HRRB entirely. I know that sounds drastic, but if the HRRB is letting itself become a pipeline for “drag queen story hour” into our local schools, maybe a drastic response is appropriate. Cobb County and its excellent teachers who volunteer their time to facilitate the HRRB competition could certainly partner with parents to come up with an equally fun and enriching alternative after-school reading program that features children’s books with actual literary merit rather than subversive ideology.

But I understand that HRRB is a time-honored tradition in Cobb County, and it is certainly a beneficial program despite its current flaws. Thus, short of completely opting out of the competition, I would suggest, in the alternative, having Cobb County schools opt out of participating in the competition solely with respect to the QBTC book and related questions. Even this limited opt-out will send a message to HRRB and, perhaps, the Georgia Book Award selection committee that Cobb County will not so easily cede its educational responsibilities to those who are more concerned with promoting a favored ideology than they are with teaching good literature in a way that respects our community values.

Thank you for your consideration of my concerns. 

Regards,

Wes Jackson

[1] See “Does this promote an agenda?” Drag Story Hour, Drag FAQs ( https://www.dragstoryhour.org/resources).

[2] I have not received any “Koch” funds for expressing these views.

[3] “As a parent/ caregiver, how can I be a good ally? Drag Story Hour, Ally FAQs (https://www.dragstoryhour.org/resources).

[4] I received the Committee’s rating rubric in response to an Open Records request. The link is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17gmNO_74qyjGs8VrXFrwCi9xmY8V8mPUMSUK8IhcH5s/edit?gid=1700427371#gid=1700427371. The 3/5 rating is shown on the “Form Responses 1” page of the spreadsheet, specifically at cell E:87. The committee member who provided this initial rating did not give written comments on the book, and I was told that the Committee’s final review of the top 40 books occurred in a closed-door meeting where no notes or minutes were taken. Accordingly, this one committee member’s evaluation of the book’s literary merit is the only written evaluation the GCBA Committee has produced to me.

[5] Paul, Darel E., Drag Queens, First Things, Feb. 1, 2023 (available at: https://firstthings.com/drag-queens/?_gl=1*4ll1p2*_gcl_au*NzI0MTA3MDQzLjE3ODUzNzg0NjY.*_ga*NzcyMzQ5NTkzLjE3ODUzNzg0NjY.*_ga_7N59F4334H*czE3ODUzNzg0NjUkbzEkZzEkdDE3ODUzNzg0NjYkajU5JGwwJGgw). Mr. Paul’s article provides a more thorough history and description of “Drag” culture and its contemporary relevance. Mr. Paul’s article also provides more detailed examples of the sexual vulgarity at the center of drag culture. I won’t go into detail here because the examples are quite lewd and misogynistic (which itself is a fair and concise critique of drag), but they are discussed in the article if you wish to learn more.

[6] See Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl, Booklists, https://www.gahrrb.org/booklists.

[7] See Georgia Children’s Book Awards, https://coe.uga.edu/events/georgia-childrens-book-awards/.

[8] For example, see the 2025 conference agenda, available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u5mrCbXY-2Wn5hX1spZIDK3_BOOwuvjk/view (the “2025 Agenda”).

[9] 2025 Agenda, p. 10. I requested the materials for this presentation through an Open Records request but was told they were not available.

[10] 2024 Agenda, p. 14.

[11] 2023 Agenda, p. 8.

[12] These slides were requested and received via an Open Records Request. I was not provided presentation notes, so I can only guess at the specific content discussed based on the slides.

[13] 2023 Agenda, p. 14.

[14] See GA Children’s Book Awards, 2025-2026 Book 4-8 Committee Members (for 2027 Award), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P3aJUdHe_t3O4yLtfkW-Nb1vGeWH7H7t/preview, p. 5.

[15] Katie Sciurba, Flowers, Dancing, Dresses, and Dolls: Picture Book Representations of Gender-Variant Males, published in Children's Literature in Education, 2017, v. 48, n. 3, p. 276. I do not have full access to all the academic articles cited in this analysis, and am relying largely on the abstracts except where I quote the articles directly.

[16] Katie Sciurba and Kris Bell, Mermaids, Abuelas, and Fairy Wings: Jessica Love’s Julián and the Making of a Queertopia, published in 2022, Children’s Literature in Education.

[17] Katie Sciurba, Mermaids, p. 14.

[18] Taryn Brosnan et al., Teaching Challenged Texts: The Prince and the Dressmaker, Journal of Children’s Literature, 50(I), pp. 49 (2024).

[19] Challenged Texts, pp. 50-51.

[20] I emailed Dr. Sciurba on May 27, 2026, to ask if she could speak with me about her committee’s selection process. She did not respond.

[21] Indeed, I emailed Dr. Wendy Smith, the president of the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl, on May 15, 2026, to request a few minutes of her time to discuss HRRB’s perspective on the selection of QBTC. She did not respond.