Judy Blume is one of the most successful and influential authors in history.
Her works have sold about eleventy gajillion copies.
She's a cultural touchstone with generations of admirers, critics, supporters and opponents.
She achieved all of this by writing books.
So it is the absolute peak of irony to see her suddenly decided that, y'know what, books aren't really all that influential after all:
[In an Interview with Variety] Blume ... spoke out against book bans, many of which center on LGBTQ content.
"What are you protecting your children from?" she told the outlet. "Protecting your children means educating them and arming them with knowledge, and reading and supporting what they want to read. No child is going to become transgender or gay or lesbian because they read a book. It's not going to happen. They may say, ‘Oh, this is just like me. This is what I'm feeling and thinking about.' Or, ‘I'm interested in this because I have friends who may be gay, bi, lesbian.' They want to know!"
So a transgender propaganda book doesn't have the power to convince a young, impressionable child that he or she is "transgender?"
People, let me remind you: Time Magazine this year named Judy Blume one of "the 100 most influential people" in the entire world. Everyone recognizes that Blume's books have helped shape the culture, and that she has had a profound and lasting effect on the minds of millions of young girls.
So the idea that a book about an extremely popular and fashionable psycho-sexual zeitgeist might not have some effect on the young minds that read it, well, I'm sorry, Judy, I don't think you're being truthful.
