Behind the Shelves

Book censors have gotten organized. And they don't want you read.

In 2024, nurse Vanessa Sivadge blew the whistle on her employer, Texas Children’s Hospital, claiming the largest pediatric hospital in the US was illegally billing Medicaid for transgender care.

Despite a two-year investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, TCH has never been charged with wrongdoing. Sivadge, however, was fired. A surgeon who had made similar accusations was later indicted for violating patient privacy laws. (Those charges were dropped after the Trump Administration took office.)

But outrage pays! Sivadge leveraged her public profile to start Protecting Texas Children, a Houston-based organization rooted in a biblical view of gender and sexuality. For a time, the group appeared to consist of little more than Sivadge herself advocating for bans on gender-affirming care and campaigning for politicians backing anti-queer legislation.

Last year, she turned her focus to books.

Behind the Shelves, a nonprofit advocacy offshoot of Protecting Texas Children, maintains a list of more than 700 titles Sivadge considers unfit for anyone to read. The site also offers a toolkit for aspiring book banners, including a printable book list, challenge guides, and ready-made school board testimony templates. It is unclear who funds any of this, but it’s part of a trend.

Prior to 2020, most challenges were brought by a parent about a single book their child was reading. Now, though, book banners have organized, with a full 72 percent of censorship requests coming from groups who want to wipe out access to large swaths of books, according to The American Library Association.

Pen America found that 6,870 books were banned during the 2024-2025 school year, across 23 states. Coordinated censorship efforts fit a pattern of democratic erosion in the United States. Just like Trump wants to wipe out women and minorities from public spaces, these group want to whitewash our libraries.

For her latest crusade, Sivadge teamed up with Bonnie Wallace, a book-banning activist from Llano, just outside of Austin. Wallace led a successful push to remove 17 books on race and sexuality from her school library. That case received national attention last year after an appeals court ruled that the First Amendment does not extend to the right to receive information. The US Supreme Court declined to hear it.

Their Bad Book List appears to be importing or curating ratings. In addition to a few by Wallace, the list also sources reviews from Ratedbooks.org and BookLooks.org, a now-defunct site that had been run by a Moms for Liberty activist.

Ratings are assigned by parent volunteers, but libraries and scholars have criticized the methodology and objectivity of these groups. Anne Frank’s Diary in Graphic Novel form, for example, is on Behind the Shelf’s Bad Book list.

When books about race, gender or queer identities are systematically and ideologically targeted, the issue becomes less about age suitability and more about viewpoint exclusion. Remember: libraries are there for everyone.

The Bad Book List reads as if the reviewer simply searched for words without considering context or nuance. Sometimes they simply count the number of times a naughty word is used. The Harvey Milk Story by Kari Krakow flags passages using the word gay. (Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California.)

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus uses the word fuck 20 times, we are told, and references “controversial religious and historical commentary.” Let that sink in: the novel is about a woman whose dream to be a chemist is thwarted by sexist policies in the 1960s. She becomes a celebrity chef instead. Sivadge didn’t respond to an email requesting clarification, but I’d like to know.

Behind the Shelves doesn’t want us to read about that because… why?

Authors Against Book Bans, of which I’m a member, asked me to research Behind the Shelves, because it is part of this coordinated effort. Many of the other sites don’t even use parent volunteers with word searches. They use AI to make decisions.

“It’s outrageous,” says Laney Hawe, co-founder of Texas Freedom to Read Project. AI often makes mistakes, she points out. Like word-search-based reviews, AI doesn’t understand nuance, human experience or context.

“The beauty of books is about human experience,” Hawe says. They make us think and open our eyes to a new way of thinking.

Like many of these groups popping up, Behind the Shelves grounds its mission in biblical values, framing censorship as a moral imperative.

“Behind the Shelves exposes the explicit, pornographic, and wildly inappropriate books being pushed on Texas children under the guise of ‘education’ in public and school libraries,” it states.

The question, of course, is who decides what is pornographic.

In one video on her site, Sivadge singles out Let’s Talk About It by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan - as pornographic. The book is a guide to sex education for teenagers in graphic novel form.

Sivadge’s list reaches beyond her very broad definition of porn. In another promotional video, Sivadge objects to Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give because “there’s a race scene in it.” Other objectionable books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

As more books are censored, they become part of a negative feedback loop. Each time a news article or Facebook post lists that book, it moves up the search engine. We see it mentioned and condemn it without even reading it. Well, if that library banned it, so should ours. When removals are systemic and ideologically driven, democratic norms around pluralism and viewpoint neutrality weaken.

The point of libraries is that they serve everyone; They are there for all; not just a few. The beauty of a book: if you don’t want to read it, don’t. But leave it there for the person who is interested.

As censorship advocacy groups like Behind The Shelves spread word of their Bad Book Lists, parents use them assuming they are reliable, when they are not. This is where problems arise, says Hawe, mother of four children.

Texas Freedom to Read agrees that book choices need to be age-appropriate. One meant for teenagers should not be shelved in a first grade library. But these new censorship groups aren’t talking about age appropriateness. They don’t want anyone - adult or teen - to know about our history of sexism or racism or queerness in America.

“If you trust an organization to make a decision for your child, you’ll be disappointed,” Laney says.

We parents are fighting illiteracy in an age when kids spend more time watching toxic TikTok videos than they do reading books. Sivadge would do far more good for her community if she focused on the harms social media do to our children and left decisions about books to parents and libraries.

Any questions about a book? Parents should ask their librarian or an educator who knows your child. Or read it together and talk about it.