A Denton school board candidate challenged books. She wants more removed from DISD libraries if she wins.

"I've gotten so much heat about that. It's ridiculous," Rachaner said. "The images in there were incredibly disturbing. And people would know that if the district had released the entire packet that I submitted. They didn't. They only released the first two pages, which was the reconsideration form."

A copy of Rachaner's challenge was posted on a Reddit forum April 27 prompting personal attacks and threats against her and her family, Rachaner said. Looking back, Rachaner said she wishes she'd made it clear that she wanted only the graphic novel taken from the shelves. The novel, she said, can stay. 

In Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, and in the version adapted and illustrated by Nault, fertile women have been enslaved by a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the U.S. government.

Rachaner said she was unsettled by some of the images in Nault's adaptation.

"I brought the graphic novel out because it showed incredibly disturbing images of women being murdered, a woman being raped, a woman with a gun in her mouth, a woman partially nude," Rachaner said. "Just images nobody in their right mind could look at and go, 'Oh, yeah, that's cool. Let's put it that in our library where 14- and 15-year-olds can go and look at those images.'"

The Handmaid's Tale is one of five books Rachaner asked Denton ISD to remove from libraries in 2022. She has also challenged Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson, Burned by Ellen Hopkins and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell.

In her challenges, which were obtained in full by the Denton Record-Chronicle this week, Rachaner objects to sexual content, violence, rape, substance use and racism. 

Critics took issue with some of the candidate's suggestions. The challenge forms include a section that asks what the challenger believes should be done with the book. It offers four choices: removal from curriculum; denying the material to the challenger's child; use it as a resource material or a choice selection; or move it to a higher grade level.

In each of her challenge forms, Rachaner added her own box to check. For Black Flamingo, a young adult novel about a young Black man discovering his homosexuality, she suggests the district "burn it." For The Handmaid's Tale, Rachaner says "trash it and order a mental health exam for the author."  

Rachaner's complaints include reviews of the titles from a website, BookLooks.org. The website doesn't list or name any of its leadership, but denies any affiliation with political or civic groups. LLC filings show that the site was launched by Emily Maikisch, a Florida resident and Moms for Liberty member.

Critics and LGBTQ activists label Moms for Liberty as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. In addition to listing page numbers and including offensive passages, the website keeps a tally of vulgar or obscene language. It also has a rating system for books.

Rachaner bristles at accusations that her stance makes her homophobic, transphobic or fascist. 

"It's not about at all. I have no grudges or issues with anybody," she said. "The point is that I don't want my kid exposed to something. I don't want any child exposed to books that are sexually explicit in a way that's too graphic for somebody their age and for their developing brains. I don't want them exposed to that. And that's all. It's not about whether that book has some homosexual characters, heterosexual characters, I don't care. It's all the same. To me, if it's sexually explicit, it doesn't belong in my school."

She also rejects the idea that challenging books is banning books. She said adult topics are suitable in public libraries, and she has no plans to protest materials at the Denton Public Library.

Denton resident Kristine Bray has been attending school board meetings frequently, and has been raising her objections to the book challenges. Bray, who is a transgender woman, said the rhetoric nationwide and in Denton has been homophobic and transphobic.

Bray said that among the content Rachaner and others are challenging, some of it is characters talking about being gay. 

Bray said, "I cross-referenced some of the page numbers, and it's a queer character talks about being queer. Or this is the character who's talking about performing drag. But of course, then she says that it's, you know, sexually explicit and it needs to be burned.

"It seems like there there is a kind of national, almost top-down project of removing queer experience, of removing honest history and discussion about racism and experiences of racism in people's lives and in the country at large from library shelves."

Bray said that books that reflect LGBTQ lives and experiences can humanize real-life LGBTQ people.

She said that for some students like herself, school libraries are the only libraries they can visit. LGBTQ people often recall knowing they were gay, bisexual or transgender from childhood.

"Queer and trans and gay kids go through lots of bullying often, and that might just come from a lack of understanding or a lack of acceptance," Bray said. "And these are things that can be found through literature and seeing, 'Oh, you know, this person may be gay, but they're still human. And I know that because I've read this book, where a character was gay, and they were just a cool character.'

"Books are a very important way to learn about the world."

Rachaner said she first became concerned about library materials in Denton schools last August when the school board approved revisions to policies governing challenging materials, and to include the Texas Penal Code on obscenity in its reconsideration of materials.

Rachaner said she was initially excited by the revisions but was ultimately disappointed that the district still requires people to challenge one book or item at a time. The district maintained that rubric to fulfill what's called the Miller Test. Review committees have been working through challenged material to consider the entirety of each book or material.

"At first, we really thought that that was going to be a successful strategy," she said. "And we were very excited that they were taking a look at it. We were excited that they were, you know, finally addressing the issue on a broader scale and we were hoping that that meant we weren't going to have to challenge books one by one.

"We thought that through this new policy, they would take a broader look at the books that are offered in the libraries and just, you know, get rid of the ones that were sexually explicit. However, that didn't happen."

Less than a year later, Rachaner said, some board members dismiss parents' continued requests to remove books, or joke about it. And she said the reconsideration forms are still cumbersome and time-consuming. Parents expect teachers and librarians to act in loco parentis, she said, and school officials shouldn't make erotica or graphic sexual or violent material available to students.

For those challenging books and speaking out in protest of select books in the school district's libraries, they believe the content can harm children.

"There's two issues, the way that I see it," Rachaner said. "One is lowering the moral compass. When you start to say, 'Well, you know, if I can read this type of language in my school library, it must be OK. It must be OK to talk like that.'"

The other issue is that children aren't on the hook to protect themselves, she said. 

"We try to guard their hearts as much as we can at home and on their devices and things like that. But it just seems to not be a priority once they're at school. And to me, that's just wrong," Rachaner said.

Rachaner said school board members can influence curriculum and cast their votes for or against long-standing vendors.

"If the board decides that, for example, we don't want to partner with Scholastic anymore, we have the ability to bring that up for a vote and determine whether the majority makes that decision or not. We don't have to partner with every vendor available, we don't have to purchase books from every publisher available," she said. 

Challenging books isn't an attempt to completely sanitize student's experiences, Rachaner said. 

"I'm not saying keep kids in a bubble and we don't ever do anything that's not perfect about the world," she said. "But there's a difference between a child reading a book and realizing that there are some tragic things that happen in life and that people make bad choices, and that there are some complicated things worth reading about and worth dialoguing about.

"That's different than having a child read a book that talks about how great it feels to get high and how great it feels to have sex with multiple partners. Or that is a graphic description of a child being raped. That's not the same."