Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

By Q on July 11, 2024

Another addition from the Banned Book Club.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is the first time I've gone nonfiction with a graphic novel, much less a memoir.

Maia Kobabe is nonbinary and asexual, and grew up in the most hippy household I've ever seen portrayed in fiction or nonfiction. Even then eir parents and family members pushed back on eir identity.

At this point, you may have noticed the Spivak pronouns. Didn't know that was their name until I read this book.

So as for the book itself: nothing was really new in terms of content. Between what I've read and people I've followed on social media, a lot of this has been things I've seen discussed in bits and pieces. Where this book is different is the portrayal gets a lot more visceral. It punches harder. Some of it is just because it's a visual medium, but some of it is the inner anguish that doesn't always get portrayed (Tranny did a similar thing).

Very different story in a lot of ways, but The New Kid has parallels to this book in that you have someone trying to figure out who they are and the individual/character already is someone who draws, so you have a visual person visually telling their story.

I wish the story had natural breaks in it. I read it in one go, but if I wanted to stop, it felt like I was going to have force it, instead of there being chapters or anything similar.

Now as for why is this a banned book? Couple of key reasons:

1) It's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable to talk about gender and sexuality as anything other than either/or. 10 years ago, I got to hear about a coworker losing their crap when I talked about this same idea in a research methods class (and they were a turd of a human being, so it brought me joy to essentially say "water is wet").

2) It's a visceral portrayal. This is not a sanitized version of gender discussions, so it becomes an easy argument to say kids shouldn't have access on the grounds of adult topics (though it's arguably most important for the people growing up to see that the world isn't black and white).

This probably isn't something I'd have gotten to on my own, and it's probably not something I'll revisit, but it was an interesting book.