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Notes -
For a middle-school student, I think one gay book in a blue moon would be kind of ideal. You want 99% of books to portray kids and adults in the world and how they live virtuously despite adversity, and 1% of books to provide a framework which the child can latch onto if they find themselves at puberty with no opposite-sex attractions. Where I have problems with the genderqueer books is when they tip over into pornography or into brainwashing. There's a fine line between having a gay character who is happy with their life and telling kids that it being nonbinary is a shortcut to being cool, special, or rebellious, or even worse, telling them that coming out as trans will solve their feelings of being lost in the world.
Of course, I also assume middle-school students are sufficiently exposed to portrayals of gay characters in other media, be it sitcoms or movies...
The average middle-schooler is aware of media portrayals of lesbianism. Actually, the upper half of elementary too provided they have an older male sibling. They won't admit it to you, of course, but they do know.
The actual issue isn't "muh gayness".
Actually, it isn't even the naked people[1].
It's the fact that, more than anything else, it's oppression pornography. It hopes to show oppression, either real or imagined, as the only virtue you need. Hence, if you can find some oppression (the demand vastly exceeds supply in modern societies), or identify with some oppression, then you have the cheat code to life.
That is the harmful message, why people whose political identity is wrapped up in being as much of a victim as possible love reading and writing these books, and they should be removed because books that are written like this are inherently garbage.
[1] Adult traditionalist men usually call this "pornography", but that refers to media that's supposed to be sexually stimulating, and these books are very far from that. Everyone but them understands this instinctively, though, so that complaint falls on deaf ears.
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