Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Summary from Goodreads:

n 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Review:

I’m so glad this book exists. I chose it for the February book in the Banned Books Book Club I started several months ago at my library. It’s currently the number 1 banned book in the country. So far, one member of the book club, which meets this Friday, came up to me and told me thank you for picking this book because she’d never have picked it up otherwise and now she feels like she understands some things a little bit better. Honestly,  feel like maybe I do too. I’m excited to talk about this book with a group of people from multiple generations.

There were things I related to. I remembered my first pap smear, and my first period. I remembered feeling like there were things everyone else seemed to know that I didn’t. And I remembered figuring things out about myself as I dated. This book has that ability to make you think back on your own experiences. And I can’t help but think how much harder my journey would have been if there were things I didn’t know about myself and my body, and I could’t find anyone like me in the books I was reading or the shows I was watching. I’m so glad Maia found eir tribe amongst what seemed to be really good, supportive friends.

One of my favorite parts of the book comes in the introduction of the version I was reading. ND Stevenson in November 2021 writes in the introduction, “At the time of writing this, parents in Texas and other states have pushed to have Gender Queer banned from school libraries. It’s not enough for them to rigorously restrict what their own children read, as my parent did; they insist that they have the right to make that choice for everyone. I understand -more,  I think, than they think I do -why they want this. It’s a last, desperate attempt to hammer an infinitely complex world into a small, unthreatening shape; to enforce a fantastical reality where challenging subjects simply don’t exist; to hole themselves up in a crumbling fortress as the the floods come in and let there own children pay the price.”

This book isn’t an instructional manual. It’s also not the typical graphic novel. It’s an autobiography of one person’s journey of self discovery. The book lets the world know that it’s okay to take time to figure out who you are, and it’s okay to be who you want to be. What better message is there?  I give this book a 10/10.