Gender Queer

 
 
Gender Queer
by Maia Kobabe
Oni Press

2019

 

 

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir. I heard about it and picked it up because it has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the most frequently challenged and banned books in the recent conservative campaign to control public education and censor queer people's voices and lives. 

 
Gender Queer is the story of Kobabe's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, with an emphasis on the events that helped em understand eir identity as nonbinary and asexual. About 3⁄4 of the way through the memoir, Kobabe decides on the e / em / eir pronouns. (Personally, I like the singular they / them / their pronouns. I think they're simpler and more effective for communicating to others. But my preference is not the one that matters here.)

 
Kobabe was born to hippie parents in northern California and lives eir entire life in what appears to be the most liberal, understanding, and welcoming community any queer kid could hope for. Kobabe struggles throughout eir life to understand eir gender and sexuality, a task that is difficult because of the general human difficulty in understanding oneself, and because of the lack (until relatively recently) of widely known identity terms to describe a person who is neither a man nor a woman. 

 
It does not appear to be difficult, at least as Kobabe tells eir own story, because of prejudice, discrimination, or anti-trans violence, none of which e experiences. Other people don't always understand Kobabe, but that's sometimes because of their ignorance about the existence of the emerging nonbinary social identity (an ignorance that Kobabe shares for most of eir life), and sometimes because of Kobabe's difficulty in telling anyone else how e feels about emself.

 
Kobabe experiences a desire to be flat-chested, a dislike of being called a girl or woman, a profound discomfort with eir period and trauma from gynecological exams, a difficulty navigating romantic relationship (which e enters mostly out of curiosity and ends due to an almost total lack of desire), multiple comings out as e gained new self-understanding, and eventually a degree of comfort with the adult life e's built for emself. 

 
Kobabe tells eir story with admirable honesty and directness, even details that might feel unflattering or embarrassing. I don't have children or know what's 'appropriate' for them, but I would say that anyone who's old enough to watch an R movie is old enough to read this, and anyone who's struggling to understand their own gender or sexuality might benefit, even if it makes their parents uncomfortable.
 

Had e been born in the 1960s or 70s, I imagine Kobabe might perhaps have identified as stone butch. Today the nonbinary identity is more widely known. In between was a period of where there were perhaps fewer options to understand and describe someone who has this particular constellation of feelings about sexuality and gender. 

 
I also struggled to understand myself in the late 1990s and early 2000s, although part of my difficulty was that I lived in a small town, the internet was new and I wasn't tech savvy, and once I learned that trans people existed outside of science fiction, the only images of trans women I saw (and initially the only other trans women I met in college) were very feminine, attracted to men, and mostly about twice my age. But like Kobabe, I eventually learned to understand myself and make peace with my body and identity.