Gender Queer

In celebration of Banned Books Week, Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe, 2019. I bought this a few months ago - I mostly try not to buy books and get everything from the library, but I think it had just been challenged or banned somewhere and it was a support/spite purchase. I thought it was really well done - a lot of really intimate, personal moments, put together into a comprehensible more-or-less chronological narrative, with a sort of steady, comfortable tone. (Raina Telgemeier walked so Kobabe could run?) I teared up a couple of times - when Kobabe meets eir niece, and on the "gender landscape" page, which I had seen online but was even better in context in the book. (You can see it here for instance.) If anyone is curious I would rate the age-appropriateness as "teen and up" - there's some bodily fluids and a couple of sexual acts, and I think Kobabe emself recommends it for high school and up, but I would personally be fine with my 13yo reading it. (My only qualm is that Kobabe talks about a couple of very painful and traumatic gyn exams, which, like, I totally support em writing about eir own experiences! but could make readers as yet unexperienced with gyn exams more scared than they perhaps need to be! Hopefully readers will also encounter less-scary portrayals elsewhere!)

(On another note entirely, I don't know whether it's Dreamwidth or Firefox that is red-dotted-underlining all the words I type that it doesn't recognize... I'm guessing Firefox because it has underlined Dreamwidth, and you would think that Dreamwidth would know the word Dreamwidth - but either way, someone should teach it some damn spivak pronouns. Stop telling me eir and emself are misspelled! They absolutely are not!)