Guide to the book GENDER QUEER

Meme-Busting Banned Book Week

Banned book week this year was from October 1 to 7th, but lingers through the month.

On Monday, my friend Jane, an elder lesbian in her ‘80s whom I visit weekly at her senior residence, got into it with me about banned books and how all the Red States blah blah blah because she knows all there is to know about them as she listens to MSNBC all day and is a huge fan of Rachel Maddow.  

So I’m standing there, in her apartment, telling her about the book Gender Queer which she’s never heard of so I promise her that I will send her photos of the book and she would see why parents want the book removed from school libraries. 

But she wouldn’t let me have the last word so I’m yelling at her because she’s hard of hearing and I am too (since childhood). We both wear hearing aids, but we’re accustomed to yelling at each other anyway and I’m standing there wondering how well-insulated the walls of this residence are or perhaps all the other residents are deaf, too. 

“THEY ARE ALL NUTS,” Jane shouts, “ALL THE RED STATES DIE YOUNGER BECAUSE blah blah blah. 

“WELL THEN I’LL BRING MY NUTCRACKER,” I yell back which is so funny she pauses for a minute and I have my chance to bid her good night and thank her for dinner which is served to us in the resident dining hall where we have to behave ourselves. When I sit close and speak slowly facing her directly so she can see my face and read my lips some. It is in these moments that she tells me about her visits with her recently transitioning ‘grandson’ she helped raise, a college student now. I advise her on how to best support him and keep him talking to her while taking the focus off gender.

I sent her the pictures from Gender Queer on Facebook Messenger. Then, yesterday, she posted a banned books meme from Stephen King to her FB page and I decided to take her 240 book-loving contacts list for a ride. I know they are all liberals, too, because she has unfriended all the Trumpsters including her brother. Jane does not like to be contradicted.

Here is the meme which is now several years old.

My response with pictures:

Hey Kids, 

Here’s the graphic novel called GENDER QUEER that all those mean Red State parents don’t want you to read. It’s an award-winning book and the LGBTQ lobby group thinks that every school library should have it on hand so that gender queer youth are supported. Pay no attention to the naysayers.

Here’s the scene that really got them riled up at all those school board meetings.

They also referred to pedophilia which is just an innocent vase from Ancient Greece.

And here’s a complete recap of the book if you can’t get your hands on a copy.

Here I link to my review and recap of the book, that I wrote two years ago, to assess it as an honest literary achievement outside of its political context. I have copied the review below.

This is an autobiographical memoir written (and drawn) by a woman identifying as non-binary who is now in her early ‘30s. It is a graphic novel presumably for young people that depicts her coming-of-age development and her discovery of her non-binary identity and preferred pronouns. This is the book that was read aloud by a mom at a school board meeting in Virginia before her mike was shut off. The main complaint of this mom was that the book has pornographic images of sexual activity, masturbation scenes and acts of pedophilia in that one of the masturbation fantasies shows an erect man fondling a boy’s erect penis. This last happens to be an image in the style of ancient Greek art, while the other scenes depict the author’s actual body. I got my copy in the adult section of the San Carlos library, but I did note that in Belmont it was shelved in the teen section.

The images shown out of context did shock me at first when I saw them on a YouTube podcast, but in the context of the narrative flow, they are appropriate to the telling of this person’s life. Technically speaking these images may qualify as pornographic and subject to laws presiding over such. I can see why parents would object to the book.

More of interest to me is the logic of the narrator. A lot can be forgiven a person telling their own story. After all one reads memoirs to find out how a person thinks, but the reader will also have their own thoughts about the narrator and will be assessing if this narrator has insight into their behavior and a sense of perspective within what is commonly perceived by society to be reality or if they have sandbagged themselves into a fictional world not supported by current agreed upon reality.

It is clear that the author has poured forth her most vulnerable moments onto the page and has thus successfully conveyed the truth of her pain. This earns her the respect of the reader. It is also clear from her use of underarm deodorant and a scene of medical trauma at a gynecological exam that she has an abnormally low threshold of pain and a highly reactive body which clearly affects her emotionally. And despite further medical traumas and grieving a relationship that has ended, it does not occur to her to seek any kind of counseling even though she has so many questions.

As to her identity the conclusions she comes to are highly influenced by current trends in gender identity. She bases much of her non-binary identity on what in my day would have been the preferences of a butch lesbian. She wants to wear men’s clothes and cut her hair short; she celebrates the discovery that she can buy underwear in the boy's department. She is mortified when she gets her period and says she believed it would not happen to her.

As to her sexuality, she imagines herself to be fondling an imaginary penis and having gay sex with another man. I have had this same fantasy as have other lesbians; it is a subset of lesbian culture that was even a subplot in the movie The Kids Are Alright. Even some straight women have admitted to me that gay sex turns them on. No doubt about it gay men are hot. The dilemma of this eroticism of gay sex and her attempting to sort out her identity becomes bound together in her mind as if we are not as human beings allowed to indulge in acts of the imagination outside of our own physical limitations. She is meanwhile attracted to both sexes, but finds relationships so confusing she doesn’t want to date anyone. Her parents who seem to be the coolest, back-to-the-land, hippie parents are supportive of her in her identity as bisexual, but her mother pushes back a little on her rejection of a female identity. 

The pronouns concept is an idea she learns from having a teacher in college who identifies as non-binary, but is clearly drawn as a woman and has a woman’s name. She discusses with her friends how difficult it is to get the they/them pronouns right, but congratulates herself that with practice it comes naturally. She meets another cool person who is a pagan spirituality teacher and a woman who identifies as non-binary because being a woman is so “performative”. Eventually, our heroine too wants a non-binary identity. The only pushback she receives is from her lesbian aunt who wants her to explain why she wants to adopt a non-binary identity and points out that the whole trend of women wanting to become men is so misogynistic. She rejects the criticism and can’t really say why. She just knows she is neither sex. 

Finally, she finds a book (Touching A Nerve) by a neurophillosopher who explains how surges of hormones in the brain while in the womb can masculinize the brain. (This author faulted for the heavy use of conjecture in her intent to disprove the existence of a soul.) But this is the explanation our heroine has been looking for that seems to put her mind to rest because now she has a scientific explanation proving she was born this way. Yet such explanations do not really compel a need for departing from one's sex. She more seems to want to not have to respond to gender expectations, but her obsessive focus on this expectation is easily a mental health issue in itself; perhaps of autism famously linked with gender identity issues. Her sister is dating a trans man who is using testosterone and asks her why she doesn’t want to be a trans man. She says she doesn’t want any more gendered traits. She wants less. But to let her know if testosterone will allow her to grow a penis. To want less gendered traits is certainly legitimate. Whether this should compel a third sex is frankly anti-science as we know it.

She chooses the pronouns known as the Spivak pronouns e/eim/eir. This allows her to develop a sense of fashion style for herself. She uses a binder which is uncomfortable so she dreams of getting top surgery. 

The book ends as she becomes a comics teacher and decides to come out to her class as non-binary so that she may help some other kid who is questioning their gender identity. This is supposed to complete the cycle from questioning to acceptance.

This ending leaves me hanging as there is no underlying revelation to explain her choice in any satisfactory way. The conclusion I come to is that this bookish, highly sensitive introvert who spends a good deal of time writing fan fiction for various fantasy novels is overwhelmed by gender expectations which is conflated with the limitations of her sex so that she cannot quite bring herself to accept the reality of her sex and must instead elevate a recently created identity in the perfect world of gender ideology. If only everyone would validate her by remembering to use her pronouns. This feels like a bandaid on a mental health issue. 

The book assumes that such a day will come when we are all walking validation units for gender ideology. This takes indoctrination of an entire society to accept this ideology and prioritize it over the parameters of biology—an observed scientific truth that has nothing to do with the prescribed gender traits that so repelled this author.

It annoys me that a secular society claiming to have separated Church from State should now compel its citizens to use the proscribed transubstantiation language of pronouns on pain of substantial fines and possibly termination from employment.

This gender identity phenomenon provides an answer to those not at ease in their own skin with their own biology. I might have been compelled to explore the same explanation if I did not already have a reincarnation ideology to explain my masculine persona. This is why I’m so offended by how such a religious idea is being taught to children in a secular society as if it were science and we are expected to go along with it whether we believe it or not. While my non-Western beliefs are not even mentioned as a possible explanation. I count this as another form of Western colonization, an export of American cultural imperialism and social extremism.