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Gender Queer: A Memoir

Gender Queer: A Memoir

Maia Kobabe
$24.99
Publish Date:
Publisher:
Oni Press
ISBN:
9781549304002
Pages:
240
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Description

Banned Book Group Selection for August 11, 2025

2020 ALA Alex Award Winner
2020 Stonewall — Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award Honor Book

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

"It’s also a great resource for those who identify as nonbinary or asexual as well as for those who know someone who identifies that way and wish to better understand." — SLJ (starred review)

About the Author

Maia Kobabe is a nonbinary queer cartoonist, a kpop fan, a voracious reader, and a daydreamer. You can learn an astonishing number of intimate details about em in GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR (America's most challenged book 2021-2023) and in eir short comics and writing published in The Nib, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR and Time Magazine. Maia’s second book is BREATHE: JOURNEYS TO HEALTHY BINDING with Dr Sarah Peitzmeier and eir third book will be a middle grade coming of age comic written with Lucky Srikumar, due out from Scholastic Graphix in 2026. Before setting out to work freelance full-time, e worked for over ten years in libraries.

Praise for Gender Queer: A Memoir

“In a world where trans and gender-nonconforming identities are still criminalized, Kobabe’s illustrated account of their life as a nonbinary person living in contemporary America balances deeply necessary social context with narrative specificity and visual appeal. (If the execrable hate group Moms For Liberty is trying to ban it, you know it must be worth reading.)”
— Vogue

"It’s also a great resource for those who identify as nonbinary or asexual as well as for those who know someone who identifies that way and wish to better understand."
— School Library Journal (starred review)