Book Censorship News, June 6, 2025

These don’t even touch on upwards of a dozen more, nor do they cover the two federal lawsuits happening over the dismantling of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (you can read a timeline of this ongoing situation, including all of the court actions on it, over here).

Another lawsuit underway right now is one that has gotten less attention than some of the others, thanks in part to the censorship issue at play taking place outside of the “typical” public library and school environment. One of the first book ban directives of the current federal administration came through the Department of Defense Education Activity schools, which fall under the directive of the Department of Defense. This creates a more direct line for federal demands than your average public school or public library–the IMLS, for example, doesn’t set policies or procedures for public libraries in the country, as those are determined on the state and local level and thus, while the financial support for libraries can be yanked as we’re seeing now, that doesn’t (yet) translate to the agency’s leader being able to demand all books on certain topics be banned from public schools. The same goes with the Department of Education and public schools. There are a lot more hurdles to jump through from the top down than with the Department of Defense’s Education Activity schools.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the administration for its book banning demands on those schools.

Today, Sam LaFrance, First Amendment Communications Strategist for the ACLU, gives background into the current book banning directive, which books are being targeted, what led the ACLU to pursue litigation, the current status of the case, and more.

From Kentucky to Japan, something is going on in certain public schools: books are being taken off the shelf, posters of historical figures like Frida Kahlo are being removed from walls, and Black History Month celebrations are being cancelled.

It’s all because the Department of Defense is implementing new policies banning books, classroom discussions, events, and extracurriculars that relate to race and gender in military-run schools on bases around the world.

So the ACLU took them to court.

What is DoDEA? Why are they banning books?

The U.S. Department of Defense runs public schools on their military bases around the world for children of active-duty servicemembers and civilian military personnel. The agency that runs these schools is called the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), and it operates just like any other public school district — except that it is run by the federal government and therefore is under the direct control of the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief, not a local school board. DoDEA serves over 67,000 students from kindergarten through high school in 161 schools across 11 countries, seven states, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

If you compared DoDEA to more traditional school districts in the United States, it would be among the most diverse, and most high achieving, in the nation.

But in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed three executive orders that impact DoDEA and how it operates:

Executive Order (EO) 14168 titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”;
EO 14185 titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force”; and
EO 14190 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”

These executive orders prohibit, among other things, the use of federal funds for anything that may promote “gender ideology” or “divisive concepts,” the latter of which has long been interpreted to cover a wide array of topics related to race, sex, and American history. EO 14185 explicit instructs the military to stop “promoting, advancing or otherwise inculcating” several “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories” — all of which implicate books and curricula that relate to race and gender, as we have seen in public schools around the country since 2021.

In President Trump’s words, these concepts add up to “wokeness”:

[W]e are getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military and it’s already out and it’s out of our society, we don’t want it. Wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad, it’s gone. It’s gone. And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?

What exactly are they doing?

In February, DoDEA began implementing these new executive orders. In several emails to teachers and staff, administrators asked that they “ensure books potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology are removed from the student section” of the library. Parents were told that “books potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” were to be relocated to a private section, away from students, for professional review. Teachers were asked to remove these books from their classrooms, and DoDEA told the press that they were taking steps to end “radical indoctrination” in school.

Using keyword searches, materials were identified for potential noncompliance with the executive orders prohibiting so-called “gender ideology” and “divisive concepts.” That review is ongoing at DoDEA HQ – and their decision could impact students in schools from Kentucky to Japan. In DoDEA’s own words, all of this happened in response to President Trump’s executive orders and guidance from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The impact is already being felt.

A training at a school in Germany, librarians were instructed to scan books for potential references to gender identity; one book, Both Sides Now by Peyton Thomas, was flagged as in violation because it “refers to transgender.”

A news outlet in Kentucky reported that librarians at Fort Campbell felt they needed to remove “any books that mention slavery, the civil rights movement or the treatment of Native Americans.” In that same school, an internal memo explicitly banned “monthly cultural observances” — resulting in bulletin boards about Black history being taken down, and the cancellation of similar plans for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. In an official, DOD-wide memo from January titled “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” the agency instructed all schools to cancel any “special activities and non-instructional events” related to Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, and more.

Several books and resources were removed from the curriculum, including chapters of two AP Psychology books that discussed human sexuality and a historically accurate, grade-appropriate biography of Robert Cashier, a civil war veteran who was born female but enlisted and fought valiantly as a man in the Union Army.

This censorship extended into sex education, too. Several chapters were banned from DoDEA sex ed textbooks, including:

“Communicable Diseases: Sexually Transmitted Diseases”;
“Unwanted Sexual Activity: Sexual Harassment”;
“Human Reproductive System, Menstrual Cycle, and Fetal Development”;
“Abuse and Neglect”; and
“Adolescence and Puberty”

The agency left no stone unturned. Even school yearbooks were implicated: no “visual depictions, written content, or editorial choices” that may indicate support for “social transition” was allowed.

All of this violates the First Amendment.

Students in DoDEA schools, just like other students in American public schools, have a right to receive information about the world around them. They have a right to read books about their own experiences or the experiences of people that are different from them, and they have a right to have their education shaped not by animus or politics but by pedagogical expertise, curiosity, and educational rigor.

What books were banned?

According to a new filing from DoDEA, 555 books and 41 curricular materials have been banned on bases around the world while they undergo review. DoDEA doesn’t want to say what those books are, but we’ve compiled a list of some titles that appear to be included, and the court ordered a full list by mid-June.

According to reporting from news outlets, plaintiffs, DoDEA itself, and other sources, these 233 books are alleged to have been quarantined or banned in DoDEA schools. Here is a selection:

Freckleface Strawberry by Julianne Moore
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love
4 entries in the Heartstopper series by Alice Oseman
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (and The Dozier School for Boys: Forensics, Survivors, and a Painful Past by Elizabeth A. Murray, about the school on which this novel was based).

Despite pleas from parents, students, and advocates, DoDEA has thus far refused to confirm which 555 books are officially on the chopping block systemwide. But based on what we know, as with other school districts, the vast majority of books allegedly banned within DoDEA appear to be by or about women, LGBTQ people, and people of color.

What is being done about it?

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with the ACLU of Kentucky and the ACLU of Virginia, filed suit against DoDEA in March on behalf of six families with children in DoDEA schools. These families have children ranging from kindergarten to 11^th grade in schools around the world.

The suit argues that these removals violate the First Amendment. As described in the initial complaint, the removals and bans are not based on “rational, age-appropriate, evidence-based concerns” but on politics and the President’s “anti-wokeness” agenda. This limits students’ ability to think critically, learn about themselves and their neighbors, and in the case of sex ed materials, even keep themselves safe from harm.

On Tuesday, the ACLU argued in the Eastern District of Virginia that the court should grant an immediate preliminary injunction – restoring curriculum, putting books back on the shelf, and preventing DoDEA from continuing to enforce the executive orders that caused all of this. The court could issue a decision at any time and at the hearing, the court ordered DoDEA to share more information about the removed books within seven days.But the battle won’t just be won in the courtroom – student organizers in DoDEA schools have been leading walkouts in protest of these new policies, often risking disciplinary action, since January. In South Korea, 40 students participated in one such walkout, which included a flag folding ceremony and a student dressed as the Statue of Liberty. And military parents, like the ones bringing the lawsuit, have spoken out about how incongruous this spate of censorship is with their jobs: “We make sacrifices as a military family so that my husband can defend the Constitution and the rights and freedoms of all Americans,” said one such parent. “If our own rights and the rights of our children are at risk, we have a responsibility to speak out.”