January 01 2026, 08:15 
County commissioners in Randolph County, North Carolina, voted earlier this month to dissolve the county’s entire library board in response to trustees’ earlier vote against banning a trans-inclusive children’s book.
According to the Randolph Hub, a local news outlet, in October, the Randolph County Public Library Board of Trustees denied a patron’s request to remove the picture book Call Me Max from the library’s children’s section.
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Author Kyle Lukoff’s 2019 children’s book — the first in a series of picture books about the title character — follows a young transgender boy’s coming-out journey at school and eventually to his parents. As public radio station WFDD notes, the book is the only one of the nearly 20,000 books in the library’s children’s collection to so much as mention gender identity.
Trustees reasoned that young children are already required to be accompanied by adults who can review the books they want to check out from the library, while some members also said that removing the book would lead to a “slippery slope.”
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Randolph County residents who wanted to see the book banned took the issue to county commissioners. Forty community members spoke both for and against the library board at a December 8 public hearing on the issue.
Among those who spoke were library board trustees Steve Grove and Betty Armfield. Grove explained that trustees “rely on highly trained librarians” when deciding what material belongs on library shelves, while Armfield said the board had adhered to its own rules and its responsibility to serve the entire community.
Following public comment, Chairman Darrell Frye reportedly spoke about a family member who took their own life after being “brainwashed” on social media.
“It’s about, to me, exposing a child before it’s able to make a decision. It’s personal to me,” Frye said, according to the Randolph Hub.
Ultimately, the five commissioners voted 3–2 in favor of a resolution to remove the library board and dissolve its existing bylaws, WFDD reported.
While Commissioners Hope Haywood and David Allen voted against the resolution, their comments during and after the hearing did not suggest they fully support keeping Call Me Max in the library’s children’s section.
“To me, it’s not about a book but about procedure. For what reason are we banning the board? There are other ways to do this without dissolving the board,” Allen said, according to the Randolph Hub. Haywood, meanwhile, suggested that she supported changing existing library policy rather than abolishing the board altogether.
Speaking to WFDD, Haywood seemed to suggest that the county commissioners had no plan for the library board beyond dismantling it. “Three commissioners felt like, just abolish the board and then figure it out,” she said.
Lukoff responded to news of his book’s role in the debacle in a December 10 Instagram post.
“A library’s entire board of trustees was fired and replaced because they refused to ban one of my books,” he wrote. “It’s so terrible.”
Responding to a comment from fellow children’s book author Tracey Baptiste, Lukoff added, “I just feel so bad for the people who live in that community and love their library.”
This is certainly not the first time Lukoff’s book has been at the center of a local controversy. In 2021, a Utah school district shut down its literacy program for reevaluation after a teacher read Call Me Max in class. That same year, parents in one Texas community called for a teacher who read the book to her fourth-grade class to be fired, and the school district offered counseling to her students.
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