A boldly revealing and vulnerable perspective on gender identity. It pointedly illustrates the issues and confusion of growing up, navigating adolescence and articulating one's experience, as an individual existing on the outside of the gender binary.

As a transgender reader, I loved this book. If I had read this in middle school or high school, I would have understood myself a lot better. I’m sad that this book has risen the ranks of banned books to become THE most banned book in America. I hope this book gets into the hands of the people who need it somehow. 

I read this book because it tops the most banned list. I am against banning books, and I don't think this book should be banned. I think that it could be really helpful to teens, young adults, or adults struggling with their identity or people in those persons' lives who want to understand them. There are many triggers in this book though so be aware of those if you are checking it out. I also think it is important to not that this is only one person's journey and people's experiences can be very different. 

This is a memoir of Maia Kobabe coming into eir own and figuring out that gender is not as straightforward as many people would like us to believe. The book is brutally honest and beautifully illustrated. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot of things that I wasn't privy to before reading. 

Supporting Maia and eir work is really important to me, because over the past week, this book was in the news, and not for reasons that I would want it to be. Republicans in Virginia decided to sue em, claiming that some "obscenity laws" have been broken. To find anything obscene about this book is to be completely ignorant, lacking in context or nuance, and to not understand that this is a BOOK FOR ADULTS. There are sensitive images within the book, but they aid in the storytelling which is the entire point of graphic novels. 

I talk about this because I'd like to shine light on this current issue and also I think books that are banned and challenged ESPECIALLY for bigot-ass-reasons should be read and reviewed even *harder.* 

This book is currently on Kindle Unlimited if you have it - if you are interested, give it a read, give it a review, and give it more exposure to its intended audience. 

This book is unbelievably amazing. Life changing. So informative and so necessary. I highlighted so many parts of this book and will share it with my children, my family and my friends. 

While I did really enjoy the discussions of exploration of gender identity and specifically how much the author's experiences rang with my own, the way fandom discussions were had was deeply uncomfortable and quite frankly distracting. The casual positive mentions of Sam/Dean (incest) fics as well as RPF (real person fanfiction) and the intense fixation on gay men was incredibly distracting and hard to read.

I thought the art style was okay and I liked very specific scenes, specifically those related to the depiction of medical. 

I don't think I will pick this book back up again but I don't regret reading it. 

I wish the Harry Potter references and the fanfiction scenes were removed but everything else was great. 

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.

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

 

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.

~

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! 

~

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.

 

This memoir written in graphic novel form was raw and emotional, but so beautiful. This is the author's story of working through eir gender and sexuality issues, some of which seem to be yet unresolved. As an allosexual cis person, I really appreciated being able to learn about Maia's experiences as an asexual, non-binary individual. Maia writes with such candor and honesty, even as e mentions several times that e never intended to write eir story at all. 

The only small issue I had with this book was that the format seemed somewhat choppy, like we were just jumping from one topic to another without transition. It did make it a little bit tricky to read at times. Some readers may not have this same issue. That said, I think this book is something that everyone could learn from, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about asexuality and gender fluidity.