The formulaic nature of said stories aside, I believe that using animals as an introduction to human gender props up transphobic notions that we should instead be resisting. Red: A Crayon’s Story (about the spectrum of visible light rather than the animal kingdom), is an allegory for the author’s dyslexia but often comes up as a resource for gender identity. There are takes on The Ugly Duckling, including a cat who thinks he’s a duck and a world where everyone is either a rabbit or a duck. Like all categories of people, children deserve to know who they are.Ī picture book about a butterfly-identified bat is dedicated “to all the trans and gender nonconforming children out there.” One, with a fox who wants to be a rabbit, is described as a parallel to trans identities.

It isn’t fair that I was so starved for Jewishness that I had to cobble together my understanding from unrelated texts, and asking other marginalized children to do the work of parsing clumsy metaphor to see themselves is a similar injustice. When books are meant to be about race but don’t talk about race, or disability but don’t identify lived disabilities, or generic “difference” while eliding real differences, it is denying language, and the honesty that flows from truthful description, from young people who are building their sense of self with the blocks we give them. Cultures and communities have unique contours and textures and histories and realities, and learning about invented creatures and anthropomorphized animals is not an acceptable substitute. The Sneetches weren’t Jewish, because Jews are real and Sneetches aren’t.

Like all categories of people, children deserve honesty, they deserve language, and they deserve to know who they are. But picture books that use animals as metaphors for human identities have not gone away. Seuss probably wasn’t referring to us specifically it might have been an allegory for the civil rights movement, or a generic vision of anti-discrimination, or a belated attempt to soften his racist legacy. There are more Jewish picture books now than there were when I was a kid, and Dr. Since I didn’t have any other books about Jews (with the excellent exceptions of Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins and The Mouse in the Matzah Factory), it makes sense that I would do the work necessary to connect the dots between the star-less Sneetches, kept out of the best beaches and hot dog parties, with my rudimentary grasp of Jewish history. I knew that Jews were a minority, given that I was always the only one in my entire class and my classmates often didn’t even know what Jews were. When I read The Sneetches as a kid, I decided that it was about anti-Semitism.

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