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As I pondered a pronoun change, I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape. Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow.

Here, Maia revises eir earlier metaphor of gender as a scale, imagining it instead as a varied landscape of mountains, sea, and forest. In this updated metaphor, the goal is not to weigh gendered traits against one another, but to capaciously encompass all of them. At times Maia’s journey is fraught and painful, but here it is pleasant and idealized, accompanied by cheerful illustrations of snow-capped mountains, golden beaches, and verdant plant life. The emphasis on nature suggests that being genderqueer is just as natural as being cisgender. It is a third kind of topography that is equally as beautiful and habitable as the others.

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