“While not bad or evil like a lot of folks might say, I suppose this one missed the mark for me in a couple ways.
One was at the intersection of memoir and guides for fellow teens.
A memoir can be anything. It can present one individual’s view, and a memoir can present a person’s point of view without apology or pulling back or stepping out of the narrative and saying, “Here’s what I said at the time, but that’s because there were things I didn’t know…”
A guide for fellow teens has a bit of a different responsibility in my view.
I wasn’t 100% sure if I should be reading Gender Queer as one adult talking to other adults, sort of showing that as a teen, Maia engaged in some of the silliness and confusion we all have, that a gender queer person also has a lot of the same thoughts, teen angst, and so on, or if I should be reading Gender Queer as an adult talking with teens.
A specific point of contention for me, if this is an adult talking to teens, was in the way that Maia discusses and depicts pelvic exams.
Pelvic exams were pretty horrible and traumatizing for Maia, and I get that, if you absolutely can’t stand this part of your body, having it examined would be a tough moment on a lot of levels.
BUT
I do think, because this book is being put on shelves as important for teens, as a book speaking to teens, it’s important to relate to teens that pelvic exams might be really unpleasant and emotionally and physically challenging…and if you’ve got the parts that warrant an exam, you should get them checked out by a good doctor.
Maia’s second pelvic exam seems to have come from a very understanding doctor who thanked Maia for talking about gender identity and how this was a very loaded experience, and the doctor did eventually have Maia leave and come back with a prescription for a pain pill and a xanax or similar to make the process less unpleasant. But this exam is described as being worse than the first.
What never happens in the book is a spot where adult Maia says, “Hey, teens reading this book: My experiences with this were pretty awful, and this still isn’t an activity I’m totally good with, but if you have the parts, and if you’re sexually active, you really do need to get checked out.”
There were other sections like this. I can understand why young Maia didn’t want to deal with having a period, so the move was to just reuse the same pad day after day until it was, by Maia’s own accounting, miraculous that Maia never got a UTI. And I wouldn’t blame a young Maia for this, but I do think, if this book is meant to be a guide for teens, that it’d be a good idea to put something in here about how, for the purpose of medical safety, it’s a good idea to take care of yourself.
Let me put it this (very awkward) way: If my child read this book, I wouldn’t be worried about this “warping” their gender or whatever, but I would feel like we needed to have a talk about periods, pelvic exams, and the like, and I would want to see if we could talk about these things in a less fearful way, a less threatening way, because I would want my child, of whatever gender identity, to be alive to assert that identity.
And, yes, elephant in the room (well, elephant’s trunk…eh, that’s a MAJOR oversell, but whatever), I don’t own a vagina, so I might be talking out of turn to some extent. But I DO own a butthole, and I’ve had more than one exam that involved some fingers headed up there, including a colonoscopy! And I recommend it! Not for the fun factor, which I would rate as VERY low, but because, you know, I’d prefer people not die of totally preventable shit way before their time just because they don’t want to let a doctor throw a couple digits up their backside.
That’s my PSA: Let doctors look at your equipment. It sucks, but it’s better than the alternative.
Gender Queer provides a picture of a person’s experience, the micro, and in that way, it’s successful memoir and probably a solid read for the right young person. And I don’t think it’s the responsibility of singular memoirs to provide an overview of everything for everyone.
Gender Queer does not, in my opinion, provide a roadmap for teens that would be helpful in navigating being gender queer themselves. It may make them feel less alone, less isolated, and this is good, but I do think that if it’s going to be placed in the position of a how-to or a what’s happening to my body book for teens, it could have more utility for gender queer teens if there was a little more…how should I say this…
Look, I had HORRENDOUS dental experiences that I would not recommend to anyone, and if I wrote about them in a memoir, I’d write about them in gory detail.
If I was writing a guide to life, I’d probably include some detail, but the sort of takeaway would be, “Don’t fuck around, don’t stop going to the dentist, you will regret not going.”
So maybe what’s happening, in my mind, is that Gender Queer is a memoir that’s been thrust into the position of a guide to gender queer teen life, perhaps without that being the intended position of the book or the author. And in that case, it’d be sort of unfair to ding it on that count.
The other thing that has me rating this one a bit lower, the stories often felt like discrete vignettes that were blended together as opposed to having a feeling of throughline, and that didn’t work for me. It ends up feeling disjointed in that way. Again, not a big deal, just a personal taste thing that didn’t go my way. “