When right-wing activists show up to protest a Drag Story Hour at a public library in the heart of New York City—of all places—you know things have gotten bad.

That’s what I thought last December, when protesters descended on a library in Chelsea, one hub of New York’s LGBTQ+ community, during an event where drag queens, turned out in all their finery, read aloud from children’s picture books to an appreciative audience of kids and their parents. A New York City Council member who was there shared a video of the protesters outside, many holding signs with regressive messages such as “Stop the Nonsense. There Are Only Two Genders”—and worse.

A similar demonstration occurred at a Queens library less than two weeks later—just the latest in a rising wave of anti-drag attacks nationwide, according to the media advocacy group GLAAD. (This time, hundreds turned out to support Drag Story Hour with chants and clever signs.) Clearly, the playful, open-minded approach to gender embodied by drag—and popularized by Drag Story Hours and the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race—makes conservatives deeply uncomfortable. The protests are also a deeply cynical strategy by right-wing activists to demonize a part of the LGBTQ+ community that is less reassuring to some segments of straight America than the cisgender gay couples of IKEA ads and TV sitcoms.

Against this backdrop I’ve been reading Who Does That Bitch Think She Is: Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag by Craig Seligman (PublicAffairs, Feb. 28). (I know Seligman from his many years as a writer and editor in the magazine and newspaper world.) It’s a readable and revelatory book about a wildly creative and charismatic star of the San Francisco drag scene in the 1970s and ’80s that also considers how attitudes toward drag queens evolved radically during this period. This period, of course, was marked by the devastations of the AIDS epidemic, and Seligman perceptively observes that LGBTQ+ people “came to appreciate the ballsiness that drag queens—many of them, like Doris, sick themselves—brought to rallying a traumatized community.…AIDS was a big part of what transformed drag queens, in a remarkably short time, from social lepers to culture heroes.” The hateful recent protests against Drag Story Hours are a direct reaction to the advent of drag queens as culture heroes who threaten the outmoded gender binary that conservatives are bitterly determined to uphold.

The spirit of drag, which sees gender as a form of performance and experimentation, is just one animating force behind Kirkus’ special issue on gender. We decided to assemble the issue because our editors have observed a surge in books that sensitively explore issues surrounding gender—whether it be discrimination and violence against women, the increasingly public claiming of transgender identities, the effects of toxic masculinity on young boys, or the ways that race and gender intersect in people’s lived experiences. In its pages you’ll find some thought-provoking author interviews as well as the editors’ columns on recent books in all genres that explore and expand upon our understanding of gender. Consider the issue a form of counterprotest: a riposte to those who would shut down this vital ongoing conversation.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.