Three authors have joined an advocacy group in a federal lawsuit challenging the Alabama Public Library Service’s anti-trans book ban.
Late last week, legal nonprofit Democracy Forward filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on behalf of authors Kit Rosewater, Page Powars, and Phoenix McDonald, and Read Freely Alabama, a volunteer organization that advocates against library censorship. The complaint argues that the Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) policy not only violates the First Amendment, but also negatively impacts the three authors’ book sales.
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“I think that having a small group of people decide what is right, not only for their own children but for the children and the families of every family in Alabama, is unconstitutional,” Rosewater told the Alabama Reflector. “I think it violates the First Amendment, freedom of speech, which I believe includes the freedom to read. Whether appointed or not, I think this level of power is outside of the position that anyone should hold of dictating what access families have to different literature.”
“The APLS Board’s own subjective judgments about what is appropriate should not determine what materials all Alabamians can access,” Read Freely Alabama co-founder and Director of Public Relations Angie Hayden said in a statement. “That is not protecting children or parental rights. It is imposing government decisions on private family matters.”
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Last November, the APLS Board of Directors approved a change to its administrative code banning materials that discuss “transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders” from the children’s and young adult sections of the state’s public libraries. According to the Alabama Political Reporter, the rule went into effect on October 1, but libraries have until June 2027 to come into compliance. Those that don’t risk losing state funding.
The lawsuit argues that the anti-trans book ban violates the First Amendment rights of groups like Read Freely Alabama by limiting their access to books that include trans characters and content, the Alabama Reflector reports. It also alleges that the policy’s language is vague and overbroad. As the Alabama Political Reporter notes, the rule does not define “gender ideology,” and plaintiffs argue that the rule could be interpreted as banning Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the main character disguises herself as a man.
The APLS rule also bans libraries from acquiring new children’s and young adult books featuring trans characters or themes. Rosewater, Powars, and McDonald have each written such books, which Alabama library patrons have requested. The lawsuit argues that the policy will hurt their sales by preventing the state’s libraries from purchasing their books.
In a statement, Rosewater noted that her novel Buried Feelings, published in July, was a national Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and “should be available to all readers and distributed equitably throughout public library systems.”
“But because the book features a transgender love interest, APLS has censured the title and prevented it from being in circulation,” she said. “Families in Alabama deserve to decide what books their own children have access to, and imposing the personally held beliefs of a few onto the masses of the public is not how a democracy works.”
McDonald, meanwhile, argues that the APLS rule would not only hurt sales of his 2026 novel The Hidden Continent, which is the third in a series and features a trans character, but would impact readership of the entire series.
“Excluding The Hidden Continent affects the readership for the entire trilogy, which will have an impact on me financially, as well. Libraries and other institutions will be less likely to carry any of the books without the third copy of the trilogy,” McDonald said in a statement.
“Readers, specifically young readers, who walk into places like libraries, look around and either not see themselves reflected if they identify as a transgender person, or they are just not going to see the mention of transgender people,” Rosewater told the Reflector. “Culturally, we lose empathy, we lose compassion, and then we lose support and validation of a very small part of the population who has already been picked on from every possible angle.”
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