Reviews with content warning for Medical trauma - Gender Queer: A Memoir

big note off the top: I appreciate the writing style of this memoir, and that the audiobook was narrated by the author! it's always a treat when an author reads their own work.

I struggled with some of the terminology (specifically around

kink

) and concepts (specifically around topics like fanfiction). mostly due to it being substantially more graphic than I was anticipating, especially when it came to

sexual exploration as a youth and adult

and descriptions of

medical experiences

. all in all I think I would have benefitted from content warnings, or otherwise some more heads up in chapter names.

all that said I found myself often resonating the experiences explored, and appreciated learning more about the ones I didn't have first hand knowledge of!

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awalsh1212001's review

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

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sourcherryyy's review

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emotional informative inspiring fast-paced

4.0

i saw this on a banned books shelf at the library. i felt it was very tame and absolutely necessary for people to have access to

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erkiff's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

5.0

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iqlofty's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.75

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ashley_mrose530's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative reflective fast-paced

4.25

I really enjoyed the art style of this one. It was simple and concise even though the content was deep, emotional, and sometimes difficult to read. I applaud the author for writing about eir experiences of being nonbinary in a forced binary world. It couldn't have been easy to relive some of these things while writing and drawing them.
I really appreciated the look into an experience much different from my own to see how much nonbinary people have to go through and try to see my own misgivings and ways I could try to help make things easier.
The main criticism I have is that this jumped around quite a bit and some of the things I didn't think were entirely necessary. I know memoirs are difficult and sometimes don't work chronologically but I do prefer them to be as chronological as possible and I think this one was better than some others I've read but it still felt a little choppy to me and unorganized. I also felt like some things were brought up but didn't really have anything to do with the overall story. Like the snakes thing was brought up but then never mentioned again. I don't know if it was included just to give personality and show how "tomboy"-ish the author was or what. If that was the case, I feel like it could have been incorporated a little bit better rather than just randomly inserting it in the beginning with no connection to anything else.
Besides that, this was a really good graphic novel and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to be a better ally to the trans and nonbinary community.

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