Gender Queer
In 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 and fundamental violation 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.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
43mentions
31people
2021–2026years
2% recommend70% neutral28% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Gender Queer isn’t a children’s book. It’s a book for older teens, and I think it’s quite appropriate in like a highschool setting for example. Go Ask Alice has worse than that(rape and prostitution and addiction), was published decades ago, and is considered a classic staple of American literature for teens.
- Nice strawman you constructed. However, it was burning the moment you put it together.
Its easy to say that pornography and smut are the only things banned in school and public libraries, as your claim. But thats easily demonstrably false.
One only need to look at the American Library Association's banned list
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
What do we see? Descriptions of sexual acts? Well, some. But we also see horrific accounts of sexual slavery, high schooler life troubles including suicide, a comic called 'Gender Queer', depictions of magic (read: non-abrahamic occult practices).
In general, anything that doesnt fit the puritanical hard right wing christian gets threatened with bans, with great scruitiny on LGBTQ, sexuality, mysticism, suicide, and real troubles of young adults in high school.
But its completely disingenuous to says 'oh its just smut'. No. Its censorship for people who cant vote, and have no power. And the censorship is done by adults who want to pretend that not having a LGBTQ book will make young adults 'not gay' or some bullshit.
> What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.
'Young children' are like 5 or 6. And no, its not a "right to show smut". Its having these books on the shelf in a age-appropriate way. These christian nationalist types are targeting anything related to anti-christian sentiments, DEI, LGBTQ themes of any sort, and whatever else falls in the sights of these worse-than-nazi folks.
Even a picture book that says a friend has 2 dads (and elementary way to relate) is banned. And those are real situations children will deal with, book or no. Im not saying to an 8 year old to read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty", either. But if they look up basic LGBTQ books cause they feel different, yeah, they should be able to.
Also, I think it would behoove you to learn your history, especially with the original nazies. One of the first libraries they dismantled and burnt was the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen... or a university for sex medical studies. Some of the first trans research was done there. And anyone who wants to destroy knowledge is an enemy of me.
- Your one page shocker doesnt address anything I said. It just shows how sexually backwards you want older children and young adults to be.
From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir
And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.
And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.
But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.
Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.
At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.
Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)
The underlying theme with your comments and invoking shame points that you support the utterly failed approach of abstinence only education. Everywhere its tried is an abject failure. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e...
And Id say that you are harming your children more by arbitrary abstinence, than by actual education. Shocker image or no.
- This is a 240 page book and the page you are linking to is more than half way in. No teen is reading this far in and frankly probably wouldn't even pick up a MEMOIR called GENDER QUEER unless the story resonates with them already.
This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages? The main character doesn't advocate for sexual activity of any kind, they actually seem to lose interest and proceed to display positive emotional communication skills by telling their partner of their disinterest?
- > No teen is reading this far in and frankly probably wouldn't even pick up a MEMOIR called GENDER QUEER unless the story resonates with them already.
Exactly this. I remember how much hatred and strive was back in my high school days, with "fa@@ot" tossed around with anything not masculine. As a clarinet player, I got that a LOT. (Evidently the F word auto-kills a post. Hello, context matters.)
If a middle or high schooler is even so much as picking this book up, means theyre trying to cope with their own sexuality, that folks like NoMoreNicksLeft tremendously shames and demeans.
> This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages?
We both know that answer. Of course they didnt. They gravitated to the single shocker image, and even ignored the shocker image of asexual feelings and how they're OK.
Ive been fighting against these types of christian nationalists for decades. I remember when Reagan called HIV a gay disease, cut funding, and said 'God would solve it'.
Killing us doesnt work, cause straights end up having children who are LGBTQ. And no amount of conversion therapy (sexual assault, seriously) or abstinence, or active denial of library materials will ever get rid of LGBTQ.
Hell, even Muslim nationalist nations can execute gay people, and there will still be gay people.
But this is the fight and the hatred we deal with on a weekly, and sometimes daily routine.
- Any given library is failing to make most books that have ever been printed in human history available, because it would be completely intractable to do so. Any given library management can always claim that a book they don't make available because they disapprove of it, is in the vast class of books they haven't even thought about including in their library. People will only even bring a complaint if a specific book becomes politically salient for some reason - which might be because a book was available at a library and then was removed; and this means that banned book lists are inherently political documents that serve to highlight specific books that the list-compiler thinks are unfairly suppressed. There's no meaningful difference between a library not stocking Gender Queer and a library not stocking Camp of the Saints; all that matters is what the political sensibilities are of the person or organization putting together the banned book list and deciding what titles to include on it.
