Extremists & School Board Candidates Mingle at Tomball “Defeat the Dirty Books” Meeting

In my recent post about attacks on books in Klein ISD, I mentioned a meeting marketed to residents of Klein, Tomball and Cy-Fair ISD that promised to help “Defeat the Dirty Books” in those districts. The event’s main speaker was Tracy Shannon, leader of the Texas branch of MassResistance, an SPLC-designated hate group that rose to prominence in the 2000s for their opposition to “the homosexual agenda,” including gay marriage. Shannon has personally challenged dozens of books in Humble ISD, where she lives (she is not a parent of a student in the district), and she claims that her actions have resulted in “thousands of books” being removed from HISD.¹ Shannon spoke at a similar meeting last week in Lubbock.

I reviewed audio recordings and pictures from the meeting, and decided to write about them to highlight the extremism and the evolving tactics of the folks who are trying to remove books from Houston-area public schools.

In fact, the event was so extreme that its original sponsors, the Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women, withdrew their support of the meeting after previewing Shannon’s presentation. Nonetheless, the meeting was attended by about 45 people, including Texas State Representative Steve Toth. Toth spoke at the meeting, as did recently announced Cy-Fair ISD school board candidates Ayse Indemaio and Todd LeCompte. Tara Beulah and Priscilla Lashley, who have challenged books in Tomball ISD and Klein ISD, also spoke.

Shannon started on a defiant note, acknowledging that among the audience were people who might disagree with her message. “Stay. Listen. Learn something,” she said. “You might see that we don’t hate anybody and we really care about our children, and we’re not going tolerate our children being groomed and being scandalized in the public schools that we pay for.”²

Shannon also remarked that she has been called a bigot, a transphobe, and a homophobe (as well as a “beacon of hate,” a “nazi” and a “fascist”).

To be clear, there’s a reason Shannon gets called a bigot, a homophobe, and a transphobe: She frequently says bigoted, homophobic, and transphobic things. On social media, for example, she complained about the number of “homosexual” lawyers in Humble ISD, and the number of lesbians on book review committees.

At the meeting in Tomball, she said, “Let’s just be real: there’s no such thing as a transgender person. There are men and women.” And she argued that libraries need to carry books that portray the “negatives” of homosexuality, as opposed to “the Hallmark version sold to you from Hollywood and in advertising” in order to “convince us that we needed to accept gay marriage.”   

Shannon described the “safe space” buttons and rainbow lanyards worn by some teachers as a “groomer signal.” “You’ve heard of the bat signal?” she asked the audience. “Well, that’s the groomer signal. That means you can come talk to me about sex stuff.”

But the purpose of Shannon’s speech was to provide strategies for getting books removed wholesale from schools. She repeated her claim that her activism led to thousands of books being removed from Humble ISD, and suggested that to follow her lead, audience members should eschew the formal challenge process laid out in district policies. “It’s designed to wear parents down,” she said.³ Instead, she argued that activists should disrupt the process by bringing greater pressure—often public pressure—to bear on district decision-makers. She outlined how she created a Google Drive with passages from books she wanted removed, and then used a QR code to share those passages widely. She recommended using that QR code to create mailers and detailed how she had paid for a full-page ad in Community Impact, a local news source for the Houston area. “That went to 80,000 houses and cost me a few hundred dollars. That was a good investment.”

Another theme ran through the night’s speeches. “Fight dirty,” Shannon advised her audience. Both Shannon and Beulah, the evening’s first speaker, endorsed targeting educators who get in the way of efforts to remove books from schools. Beulah noted that after her challenge of Jacob’s New Dress was denied by a Tomball ISD reconsideration committee, she was able to publicize the names and pictures of the librarian, principal, and teachers who voted against removing the book. “At least I had their names,” she said, “I had their faces, and I could put them all over Facebook and say, ‘Hey, these are the ones that approved this book.’”

I wrote about this last year on Twitter. Beulah—who is not a parent of a Tomball ISD student⁴—actually did more than that. She also posted the educators’ email addresses, accused them of grooming (“I just want you to know the faces and the names of the people that are grooming in our Tomball ISD program,” she said), and tried to connect them to cases of sexual abuse in schools. “So a degree does not mean you’re not a pedophile,” she said.

Similarly, at the Tomball meeting, Shannon told her audience, “You have these activist librarians unfortunately in your district. It’s nice when you know who they are. I do know who a lot of them are. And I will share with you who went to the Library Association conference tonight.⁵”

Extremist individuals and groups have been targeting teachers and librarians for months. What’s noteworthy about this month’s meeting is that it was attended by Representative Toth and by two candidates who recently announced their campaigns for the Cy-Fair ISD school board: Ayse Indemaio and Todd LeCompte. Both were invited to speak after Shannon and Toth.⁶ Neither rebuked or challenged the speakers who came before them—not for their homophobia, not for their attacks on teachers and librarians. Instead, Indemaio described being radicalized to go after books after discovering that a book her then-3rd-grader son was reading “had the word ‘racism’ in it nine times.” “I started to think maybe I shouldn’t be trusting the schools,” she said.

Though Shannon was the evening’s headliner, it was actually Beulah who struck the night’s keynote: “The board members,” she said, “they should know your names. They should fear, I mean not in a bad way, the pressure that you give them.” Fear and disruption were the event’s themes. It was an evening of fearful people—afraid of change, afraid of difference—teaching each other how to instill fear in others.

(Special thanks to the parents and community members who shared pictures, videos, and accounts of this meeting.)

1. I can’t verify that claim yet. In December of 2022, I requested information from Humble ISD about all books that had been challenged over the course of the year. At that time, according to the district, Shannon had challenged 23 books and only one had been removed or restricted. But it’s possible more have been removed since then. And because she has since eschewed direct challenges for new techniques meant to encourage “soft censorship,” it’s possible the district has removed books without progressing through the formal challenge process. Still, “thousands” is a lot, and Shannon is not always a reliable narrator. As an aside: Who brags about getting thousands of books removed from schools?

2. I can’t speak for everyone, but I wish Shannon and her allies could understand that we don’t record or even protest their meetings because we hate them or want to intimidate them. We do it because we care about our children, whom they are actively harming.

3. Book-banning activists claim the book challenge process “doesn’t work” because formal reviews often return challenged books to the shelves. Of course, the real reason for that is that challenge committees read a text in its entirety, which makes them less susceptible to sensational claims about books based on out-of-contexts snippets.

4. Beulah reached out and asked that I clarify that while her children do not attend Tomball ISD schools, they are zoned for Tomball ISD. I’m happy to add that clarification. She also caught that I had mistakenly said her challenge of Jacob’s New Dress was rejected by a reconsideration committee in Klein ISD, rather than Tomball ISD. I appreciate that correction.

5. For the past two years, book banners have been upset over the Texas Library Association conference, an annual event that hosts thousands of attendees and features hundreds of speakers. The fact that the conference has included drag queens has convinced book banners that anyone who attends is a Marxist extremist.

6. During his time at the front of the room, Toth perpetuated the false claim that “furry” students are using litter boxes in local school restrooms. He said, “I’m in Tomball, and I had a parent come up to me, or actually I had an administrator come up to me and say there’s a kid in our school that’s a furry. You all know what furries are right? And this girl uses a litter box in the girls’ restroom. And she said, I want to tell the parents about it. What do you think the Tomball trustees told her? They said, you can’t do that. Because of Title IX.”

I can’t stress how dumb this is, or how embarrassing it is that an elected representative believes it. This myth has been debunked repeatedly, and it falls apart under the slightest critical scrutiny. Are these litter boxes cat-sized or human-sized? Who’s cleaning them? Are janitors going into restrooms every day and scooping human litter? And not ever saying anything about it? And in a world where everyone has a cell phone, not one picture of these litter boxes has emerged? It’s. Just. So. Stupid.