Gender is a journey of self-discovery that language struggles to capture fully.

As young Maia experiences feelings of dissonance between mind and body and finds emself continually baffled by society’s gender conventions, e uses a variety of metaphors to describe what it’s like to feel neither female nor male. These metaphors shift as Maia accrues new experiences and expands eir vocabulary around nonnormative gender identities. At first Maia describes eir gender presentation as a scale, aimed at weighing male traits against female ones, but later updates this to imagine gender as a landscape, affording multiple possibilities at once. At one point Maia voices to a friend that e isn’t cisgender but doesn’t quite feel trans either. It isn’t until early adulthood that Maia encounters Spivak pronouns (the gender-neutral e/em/eir), but still feels shy about asking others to use them and struggles to come out as genderqueer (having a fluid gender identity) to strangers and loved ones alike.

These experiences show how entrenched language itself can be within a binary system of gender, leaving very little room for possibilities beyond male and female. Even other queer people struggle to understand Maia’s genderqueerness, as when Maia’s lesbian aunt claims that trans and nonbinary youth are rejecting womanhood from a place of internalized misogyny. Even among more generally supportive friends and family, Maia feels relatively alone in eir gender journey, with plenty of queer role models but very few nonbinary ones. As a teacher, Maia reflects on the importance of providing genderqueer youth with the resources and role models that e never had. At the end of the memoir, however, Maia stays silent and doesn’t come out to eir students, underscoring the continued difficulties of articulating oneself as a genderqueer person in a body that is persistently perceived along the gender binary. As this open ending suggests, coming out is never a one-time event or sudden moment of epiphany. It is a complex, ongoing process mediated by imperfect language. 

A person’s gender identity is expressed by their body not determined by it. 

While Maia does not use the term “gender dysphoria” until late in the memoir, e experiences some version of this feeling all throughout childhood and adolescence. The advent of eir period and first Pap smear exam are disquieting moments for Maia, producing physical pain, tears, and a profound sense of disconnect from eir own body. Maia fantasizes about having a boy’s body, about adopting a gender-neutral name, and about having a male twin. In one scene, lying alone on a hillside at the age of 11 or 12, Maia holds a bundle of grass between eir legs to simulate a penis. As Maia comes to realize, however, e doesn’t really feel like a boy—e just doesn’t want to be seen as a girl. Maia’s experiences show that a person’s body doesn’t determine their identity, since Maia, while perceived by others as a girl, feels like anything but one.

However, Maia eventually comes to see eir body as a source of vital potential rather than as something to be covered up or obscured. Having dressed in boys’ clothes for most of eir life, Maia decides during a trans rights march that e doesn’t want to look like a “bland teenage boy.” Rather, e wants to look specifically genderqueer, and opts for a more colorful and flamboyant “high-fantasy-gay-wizard-prince look.” Maia notes that wearing florals now feels like a triumph since e now has the confidence to dress in clothing that is typically coded feminine without perceiving this as a threat to eir own identity. Maia’s attention to eir appearance, clothing, and body becomes more healthy and affirming the more confident e feels in eir genderqueerness, and e begins to creatively explore new possibilities rather than using masculinity to cover up or negate femininity. For Maia, therefore, identity and self-understanding shape the body, rather than the other way around

Artistic expression can be central to queer becoming for some.

Throughout Gender Queer, Maia makes frequent references to artists, writers, and pop-culture icons who played formative roles in eir journey of self-discovery, from music icon David Bowie and famed playwright Oscar Wilde to comic artists Alison Bechdel and Melanie Gillman. As a member of eir high school’s Queer Straight Alliance, Maia bonds with peers over gay romances and the Lord of the Rings series. A voracious reader, Maia encounters beloved characters like Alanna the Lioness, who dresses as a boy to train as a knight, and is later exposed to scientific research on gender and identity by neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland. As a comic book artist and avid writer of fanfiction (stories written by fans featuring popular fictional characters), Maia also crafts eir own artistic and literary works, often in community with like-minded people. By continually nodding to other texts, writers, artists, and queer cultural icons, Gender Queer emphasizes how vital artistic expression has been to Maia’s coming-out journey. As Maia models emself on some of these icons and actively seeks out new books, new music, and new zines, e draws implicit parallels between acts of literary and artistic creativity and the deeply creative act of living beyond the gender binary.

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