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In the short prologue that opens the book, Maia moves from rural northern California to San Francisco to begin a graduate program in Comics. While initially uninterested in memoir, Maia is inspired by a course in autobiography whose instructor encourages students to reflect on their “demons.” Maia realizes that all eir demons revolve around gender but is embarrassed by the short comic this inspires and tapes over it in eir journal. However, returning to it later, Maia rips off the covering pages to reveal the partial words “ENDER UEER” underneath. In this metanarrative moment, it becomes clear that the short comic Maia had first created in eir class on autobiography eventually became the graphic memoir, Gender Queer. This opening metanarrative establishes the creativity and, tonally, the sense of humor and personal introspection that will characterize Gender Queer throughout. The text is willing to play and experiment with genre, with text, and with illustration in much the same way that Maia will become increasingly bold about experimenting with gender over the course of the memoir.

The story begins with Maia’s early childhood as e navigates the confusing social expectations of gender. In first grade, Maia isn’t allowed into a treehouse because e’s not a boy. On a third-grade field trip, Maia is asked to put eir shirt back on after removing it to play in the river, even though eir male peers are allowed to be shirtless. Later, Maia also discovers something even more upsetting: eir monthly period, which causes significant emotional distress and which Maia tries to hide as much as possible. Maia finds emself envying the boys at school who seemed more untroubled by the process of going through puberty. One day, Maia’s mom reveals that she had initially planned on naming em Robin, and Maia wishes eir parents had given em a gender-neutral name. When it comes to social expectations around gender, Maia feels like the people around eir had gendered information that e didn’t have, an observation that signals Maia’s frustrations with the gender binary and points to eir feelings of gender-based out-of-placeness even from an early age.

As Maia reaches adolescence, this confusion around gender begins to intersect with confusion around sexuality. Maia develops crushes on both boys and girls and looks up the words “gay” and “lesbian” in the dictionary to better understand these attractions. Maia also finds emself fantasizing about having a penis and discovers an erotic interest both in gay male relationships and in androgyny. Concurrently, Maia finds emself emotionally attracted to women, and questions what all of this might mean, questioning whether e’s bisexual or trapped in the wrong body. In eir freshman year of high school, Maia discovers a social club, the Queer Straight Alliance (QSA), and meets a community of like-minded people who are affirming of nonnormative sexualities, which provides em with much-needed support. Yet Maia also finds that e’s generally much less interested in sex than eir peers seem to be. Upon discovering the word “transgender,” Maia wonders if this term might best describe em. To navigate these questions, Maia develops the theory that e was born with two half-souls, and that somewhere in the world e has a long-lost male twin who feels like a girl. Meeting this person, Maia imagines, would help em feel whole. 

Throughout childhood and early adolescence, Maia turns to literature, music, and queer artistic heroes to help navigate eir sense of self. E teaches emself to read by devouring the Harry Potter series after bedtime and identifies with a character from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series named Alanna, who dresses as a boy in order to become a knight and who resents her monthly period. In high school, Maia overhears eir crush talking about David Bowie and rushes home to ask eir dad if they have any Bowie tapes. Maia is entranced by the music, the first e remembers hearing with queer lyrics, and uses large and vibrantly colored illustrations to underscore how meaningful this discovery is. Bonding with peers in the QSA over queer fiction and fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings, Maia not only finds a community of fellow readers but also derives a more confident sense of self-expression from queer literature, music, and art that will remain pervasive throughout the memoir.
 
As Maia’s experiences with gender and sexuality accrue over the course of childhood and early adolescence, it becomes clear that e is deeply uncomfortable being perceived as a girl, even if e hasn’t yet figured out why. From gender dysphoria (or feelings of inhabiting the wrong body) to bisexual and asexual feelings to the possibility of being transgender, Maia must navigate profound questions about gender and sexuality at an early age. Maia also has few role models to provide clarity even if eir queerness finds general support among family and friends. Indeed, Maia’s illustrated profile of eir parents shows that neither eir mom nor dad adheres to every gender expectation, and neither of them enforce gender roles at home. Still, Maia struggles to understand the gendered social conventions that everyone else seems to so easily pick up on. Maia is candidly introspective about the tangle of questions that swirl through eir mind regarding eir own gender and sexuality. As Maia writes in eir private journal: “I don’t want to be a girl. I don’t want to be a boy either. I just want to be myself.”

Next section “The word ‘transgender’ entered my vocabulary…” – “…nothing would enter it….”

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