Maia Kobabe captures a lot of the human experience in this tidy graphic memoir. E is a kid trying to figure eirself out ostensibly on eir own. Kobabe captures the loneliness of being a queer kid in the late 90s and early 2000s in the real way e lived it. This book hit really close to my heart. I struggled hard with identity across my early to mid 20s. Some of my closest friends are trans or gender-nonconforming, many of them only came out in their 20s and 30s despite feeling it deeply for much of their lives. I identify myself as queer today even though my life probably looks very hetero-normal (?) from the outside.
I found myself thinking about how much we still don’t know about how to appropriately support queer youth. So many of the public debates are focused on sports, surgery, and sex assigned at birth, and that’s a shame. The deeper need is to learn how to set aside what we think is normal and listen to the youth telling us what they’re feeling. It’s then having the courage to tell them that everything they’re feeling and experiencing is OK, it makes them who they are, and we’re here to help them make sense of it, even if we ourselves don’t (or can’t) completely right now (or maybe ever). You can’t do that by banning books like this one.
Gender affirming care is so much more human than the public discourse would have you believe. This book is an exploration of that humanity. It welcomes the reader on a journey to understand what that means from one person’s experience. It’s a brave and powerful story, and another example of how compelling a form the graphic memoir can be.
Go read it, then give it to someone you love so they can read it too.
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