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The wholesomest banned book of the year
Mar. 22nd, 2022 03:51 pmThe aces book club read Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, and even though I totally missed the book club, I also read it anyway because I’d gone to the trouble of getting it out from the library, and everyone said it was really good. It is also apparently one of the books that’s regularly targeted by the right wing as being inappropriate for teenagers, which sounded stupid when I first heard about it but frankly sounds even more stupid now that I’ve read the book. It’s extremely for teenagers. It’s an earnest, heartfelt, wholesome coming-of-age memoir with much less actual sexual content than, say, any of Alison Bechdel’s memoirs. It explains a lot of 101-level concepts to the audience as the author recounts learning about them. The right wing’s problem, of course, is that they don’t want queer teens to learn anything, and I know that, but for some reason it feels extra stupid when actually reading the thing because it’s really pretty tame. (Or maybe my sensibilities are somewhat brutalized at the moment having just finished a massive, dense book about people dying of AIDS.)
If there was anything I didn’t like about this book it would probably be that I think I am close in age to the author and so at times it was too relatable. Like some things were affirmingly relatable (some of the ace stuff) and some things I’m sure will be very affirmingly relatable to other people (I am not nonbinary), but some things were very “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it” (I don’t want to be reminded of my tragic teenage fandom past, thanks). It is obviously not Kobabe’s fault that queer- and queer-adjacent-(for-the-moment) teenage nerd fandom of the early 2000s was cringy as shit, and e does a very good job of illustrating its general cringiness, but personally, these days I just want to rewatch Lord of the Rings in peace without remembering how much time we all wasted arguing about which Fellowship member was the gayest (all of them). (Also, no, I have not seen Turning Red yet.)
Anyway, it was cute and funny and seems like a solid introduction to a variety of Queer Feelings that teens may find comforting to know it’s not just them/educational to understand what their peers are going on about.
If there was anything I didn’t like about this book it would probably be that I think I am close in age to the author and so at times it was too relatable. Like some things were affirmingly relatable (some of the ace stuff) and some things I’m sure will be very affirmingly relatable to other people (I am not nonbinary), but some things were very “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it” (I don’t want to be reminded of my tragic teenage fandom past, thanks). It is obviously not Kobabe’s fault that queer- and queer-adjacent-(for-the-moment) teenage nerd fandom of the early 2000s was cringy as shit, and e does a very good job of illustrating its general cringiness, but personally, these days I just want to rewatch Lord of the Rings in peace without remembering how much time we all wasted arguing about which Fellowship member was the gayest (all of them). (Also, no, I have not seen Turning Red yet.)
Anyway, it was cute and funny and seems like a solid introduction to a variety of Queer Feelings that teens may find comforting to know it’s not just them/educational to understand what their peers are going on about.