Gender Queer is an autobiographical graphic novel by Maia Kobabe exploring eir lifelong journey with gender and sexuality. E is nonbinary and asexual like me but we’ve had completely different journies and relate to those labels in completely different ways.
Maia captures moments perfectly in eir art with subtle imagery that conveys a myriad of emotions in one panel. Eir experiences with periods, pap smears, and embarrassments grab you by the heart and pull you into those moments and those moments make you cry.
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I cried twice while reading Gender Queer. 241 pages and 2 of them made me cry at 2 am.
Page 49: Maia conquerers eir fear and walks the 50 feet to em first GSA meeting.
Even as someone who was out, who was in high school in the 2010s, who had supportive friends who were gay too, the first time attending GSA is terrifying. When I was 14, the school I was at had a GSA. My two best friends and I decided we’d go to a meeting. All of us were LGBTQIA+. We never went through the door.
I attended my first GSA meeting 2 years later at a different school. By that point, I was fully immersed in gay culture and the gay community. It was still nerve-wracking.
I cried, not because I related to the challenges of what Maia did, but because when e entered the room, everyone welcomed em.
Page 204: Maia discover the science of why we all experience gender differently and thinks
“So Lady Gaga was right - I was born this way. What a RELIEF”
Growing up queer, there’s this feeling of not quite fitting in. Not everyone knows why. Maia could put eir finger on the issue more than I ever could, according to eir writings, but no matter how much you know where that feeling of otherness is coming from, it’s still there until you get to a point in your life and suddenly it all but disappears.
The way people treat you as other doesn’t, but the internal feeling wanes. Knowing that what you’re feeling, who you are, is normal, is a huge thing.
I thought that my experiences as an autistic person explained why I felt other since they lessened when I accepted my autistic identities and began to understand it. It lessened more when I worked out I liked girls and more when I realised I didn’t like boys and more when I realised I wanted to present masculine and more when I found the terms asexual, lesbian, and nonbinary.
I relate so deeply to this moment because I’ve had so many of them. Knowing I was born this way and none of these things that make me stand out in society mean there’s anything wrong with me is connected to so many huge emotions so of course, I cried when Maia shared this experience of eirs.
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There are two other pages I have bookmarked in
Gender Queer. One is a
NaNoWriMo reference - this book is full of references to writing and fandom and fanfiction, all important parts to a lot of people’s queer journies - which I bookmarked purely because I read this during NaNoWriMo.
The other is where Maia references one of eir teachers, a comics professor. That teacher was Melanie Gillman. I own and have read
one of their books and it’s one of my favourite books ever!
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I never know how to end reviews, especially one like this that comment not only on someone’s creative work but also eir life story.
I think I’ll end this by saying that I think Maia is an amazing author, artist, storyteller, and e will be an inspiration for generations to come. E bares eir soul in this book and I could not stop reading.
I think everyone should read Gender Queer, especially gender diverse youth and people who struggle to understand gender diversity and how it can feel to be trans and nonbinary in society and in our bodies.