Queer and trans-themed books for young readers: a critical review

ABSTRACT

As research on transgender and gender nonconforming children and youth becomes increasingly prevalent in literary scholarship, educational possibilities arise for teachers of children’s and young adult (YA) literature in various classroom settings. This article provides a brief history of literature for children and teens containing queer and trans-positive themes, as well as critical reviews of a selection of more prominent contemporary children’s and YA texts. The aim in these reviews is not to offer an exhaustive examination of what is available in trans-positive literature for children and youth, but to consider how these texts, and others, may begin to form a pedagogy of possibility that is rooted in gender equity and social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s literature
• young adult literature
• gender
• transgender studies
• social justice
• queer theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Robert Bittner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0783-8546

Notes

1. The reason that trans and genderqueer are being used separately throughout this article is that not all genderqueer individuals identify under the label of trans. As noted in the UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resource Center (2014), genderqueer is defined as follows:

A person whose gender identity is neither man nor woman, is between or beyond genders, or is some combination of genders. This identity is usually related to or in reaction to the social construction of gender, gender stereotypes and the gender binary system. Some genderqueer people identify under the transgender umbrella while others do not.

2. These are samples of mainstream publications, though the increase in self-published literature does not allow for a comprehensive listing of all published work featuring trans themes and/or protagonists.

3. ‘A person who by nature or by choice conforms to gender/sex based expectations of society’ (Gender Equity Resource Center, 2014).

4. Gender nonconforming is defined as ‘A person who don’t [sic] conform to society’s expectations of gender expression based on the gender binary, expectations of masculinity and femininity, or how they should identify their gender’ (Gender Equity Resource Center, 2014).

5. As Stryker put it:

In 19th- and early 20th-century cities, the proliferation of gender-segregated public toilets depended not just on the development of modern sanitation infrastructure, but on the movement of women into the public realm as wage-earners, consumers and voters  … The Equal Rights Amendment went down to defeat in the 1970s in part because of the non-existent threat of ‘unisex toilets’. In the ‘80s, the AIDS crisis provoked alarmed visions of straight men becoming infected with HIV by sharing public toilets with gay men. In the ‘90s, the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated equal access for the disabled. The latest ‘bathroom bills’ [such as those in North Carolina] are simply another front in the battle over who will be accommodated in the public sphere. (Stryker, 2016)

6. While Brendan has a gender identity that might lead to him identifying as other than male, this does not take place definitively within the events of the novel – as such, he is referred to as male for the purposes of this review.

7. Sanchez, Sanchez, and Danoff (2009) state that obstacles for trans persons receiving proper medical care include lack of sympathetic medical providers and economic limitations (both from an insurance and out of pocket perspectives) that lead many to ‘obtain hormones from nontraditional sources, including friends, street vendors, the Internet, and pharmacists (in the absence of a prescribing physician)’ (p. 713).