[A local resident made the statement below at the SPLD board meeting on August 25, 2025.]
I’m holding a book from the library’s collection called When Aidan Became A Brother. Aidan is a girl, so how could she become a brother? The answer is, she can’t. Yet the author wants small children to believe they can be something they are not and never can be.
Children live in two worlds: the quote-unquote real world and the world of make-believe. In make-believe, it’s fine to pretend. But this book encourages children to believe they can actually transform into the opposite sex—not pretend, but for real.
That raises some interesting questions, such as: What is male and female? If sex is only a state of mind, why have boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, changing rooms, or sports? And so on.
Beyond these societal questions, though, lies the impact on children. Telling a child they might be the opposite sex, regardless of their body, has real consequences. Although this book only addresses social transition, the logical path leads to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries—interventions that are unneeded, medically risky, and irreversible.
We’ve all heard them euphemistically called “gender-affirming care,” yet that innocuous-sounding term is actually quite insidious. Puberty blockers halt the natural process of puberty which is crucial to a human’s biological development into an adult. Hormones artificially induce traits that wouldn’t otherwise appear. Surgeries remove healthy body parts and sometimes create crude approximations that require expensive, painful, lifelong maintenance.
Do you see the common thread? These treatment modalities are all unhealthy, unnatural, and abnormal—yet the book tells kids this is healthy, natural, and normal. The contradiction might be dismissed—it’s a children’s book, after all—if it didn’t have disastrous real-world consequences.
At least 5,747 children underwent gender transition surgeries in the U.S. from 2019 to 2023, according to insurance data—and that underestimates the true numbers.1 Leaked files from WPATH, the leading global transgender healthcare body, show clinicians offered minors life-changing interventions they cannot fully understand, despite themselves knowing the risks: infertility, cancer, and other complications.2 The NHS England Cass Review confirmed that evidence for these treatments is “remarkably weak” and of “poor quality.” Clinicians cannot reliably predict which children will persist in a trans identity, yet they put them on these pathways regardless.3
Detransitioners, many of whom started as children or teens, deeply regret the irreversible changes made to their body. Thousands of parents have been devastated by children lost to these ideas. I encourage you to visit pittparents.com to read their heartbreaking stories.
What can this board do about it? Simple: You can protect children from the harmful ideas promoted by this book and others like it—ideas that, if adopted, could ruin real lives forever—by amending the Collection Development policy.
The choice is yours.
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