Future Boobs, or The Dichotomy Of Childhood in Gender Queer

        Children are, on a very basic level, genderless at birth. They’re not sexless, but it can more or less ignored for the most part for the first few years of their life, save for in medical contexts. If you wrap a baby girl in a blue blanket, you’ll fool just about anyone into cooing, “What a handsome baby boy!”. Kids are mostly amorphous human beings until about age 9. I’m not just using this language to be subversive, I honestly dare you to take every toddler you can find, put them in identical dresses, and guess their sexes. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. They’re all flat-chested and chubby-faced, and their hair is in different stages of still-learning-how-to-grow-out-evenly. I’m being vaguely inflammatory here, but my point is that Kobabe captures that seemingly ambivalent nature of childhood perfectly in the early pages of Gender Queer, detailing eir friendship with eir neighbor’s son, Galen. 

The moment I’m talking about only takes up half a page, but early in the novel, Kobabe talks about living amongst the trees and the woodland creatures (there’s a much more eloquent way to describe this, but I honestly find my portrayal of it much funnier than any other way I could have written it) with eir friend Galen, writing that to avoid spiders, “Galen and I often just peed in the yard.” (14) The illustration that accompanies the line is straightforward, featuring Kobabe squatting with eir back towards the reader and Galen standing, both of them with streams of urine near them. Aside from being a hilarious image, it’s also very plainly real. 

There’s something incredibly idealist about the drawing, reminiscent of childhood simplicity and the desire to not interrupt playtime with something as basic as needing to pee. Moving forward, as Kobabe discusses joy at having other school students not be able to identify em, e also recounts not being allowed to take off their shirt at the beach like other, male students could. This further enforces my statement from earlier, about kids being shapeless, flat blobs. When e asked eir teacher why e had to put eir shirt back on, Kobabe writes that she simply had them put it back on, without any real explanation. And that’s just the thing, there is no explanation. Yes, an adult woman walking around shirtless at the beach has sexual connotations, but an 8-year-old? E just had to put their shirt back on. I’m not even saying e shouldn’t have, I’m saying inherently most people would agree with eir teacher but I doubt anyone would be able to give a concrete reason why. I’m not saying all children should exist in the nude, but an 8-year-old assigned female at birth is still flat-chested. The very possibility of future breasts is apparently something that must be hidden. Yes, I am aware that pedophiles exist, but:

1. Kobabe was nearly identical to eir male classmates, save for genitalia that wasn’t visible under eir swim trunks anyway.

2. Pedophiles who prey on boys exist.

3. That’s not a reason that Kobabe shouldn’t have been allowed to take off eir shirt, it’s a reason the adults on the field trip should have protected them better if necessary.

The two events Kobabe portrays capture the dichotomy of childhood, finding friendship in someone who doesn’t care what your parts are as long as they don’t stop you from collecting worms with them, and not being allowed to feel the sun on your back, despite looking nearly identical to other people who can, because of… intrinsic reasons that can’t actually be explained.