Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer: A raw and gutting memoir on gender and identity

Dear queer* people, please never stop writing.

I found Maia Kobabe's memoir (e/em/eir) to be yet another enlightening addition to literature focusing on the nonbinary experience, especially since it was one of the few books I’ve found written by someone assigned female at birth (afab). Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, the book 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.

The way the story is told took some getting used to as it did not flow as I usually prefer, feeling almost stream of consciousness-y at times in the way that e jumps from one point of the eir life to the next depending on the memory linked to the story being presently told.

Gender Queer reads as real as queer nonfiction can get, and that’s the part that makes the book all the more important - it provides information that most young people going through this stuff can not find elsewhere but the internet, which is a dangerous place. Kobabe gifts us with eir experiences, and we get to feel what e feels because the brutally honest depictions aren’t there to serve as graphic trauma porn but an experience. We feel it all - the confusion, dissatisfaction, questioning, the dysphoria. I appreciated how we were able to be invited into most of these defining moments in eir journey of discovery; like trying to understand teenage crushes, buying and trying out sex toys and how mortified and traumatised e felt during eir first pap smear - something they define as having been invasive, bearing psychological scarring.

As an enby reader, reading about a journey of coming to claim one’s own identity in spite of society’s need to define you and coming out victorious in such a sense that you become empowered to write your own story how you see fit; quotes like “I want people to be confused about my gender at all times.” and “I don’t want MORE gendered traits, I want LESS.” hit home and made me feel whole and understood, and every other queer person should get to feel that. It is truly a resource that queer people and those in their lives ought to immerse themselves with.