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Saturday, April 13, 2024

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

This is a really interesting story--the book itself and then what happened to it when it became the most banned book from school libraries. This is a memoir. The author came out as bisexual in high school describes it as relatively uneventful: they lived in the Bay Area, which is so open and welcoming that if I were trans I might never travel it is so great, and they had supportive classmates and parents. But coming out as nonbinary years later was far more complicated--at the time there wasn't much of a vocabulary for it, and so they wrote this--which was released in 2019 by a comic book and graphic novel publisher. The print run was small — 5,000 copies — and the author even worried that the book wouldn’t find much readership. Then, last year, the book’s frank grappling with gender identity and sexuality began generating headlines around the country. Dozens of schools pulled it from library shelves. Republican officials in North and South Carolina, Texas and Virginia called for the book’s removal, sometimes labeling it “pornographic.” Silver lining--as a result, lots of people discovered and read this book, so it's banning was a key ingredient in bringing it out into the light. I would definitely recommend this.

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