i was in barnes and noble today and went to the ya section cause sometimes i find gud shit there. i forgey the name of the book alreay but i flipped over it, it read something along the lines of, “___ is genderfluid. some days she’s a girl, some days he’s a boy.”
naturally i thought “ew” and put the book back down. but the genderfluid part itself isnt the main problem—
A grown adult wrote the book.
A book about mogai is being sold to literal children. I remember I started reading from the YA section at around 11; an age where I was still super impressionable. And if an 11 yr old picked up that book, they’d most likely fall down the trap that mogai is. This type of shit is actually scary; and it’s beyond me just knowing genderfluidity can’t be a thing, it’s literally harmful to children.
Oh boohoo kids might hear about the scary genders you don’t like, fuck off and let kids learn to accept each other and themselves and not your weird alienating attitude where anyone who’s different is an evil mogai trying to corrupt the children. For any other anti-mogais reading this, here’s one of the big reasons calling yourself anti-mogai is bad, because you’re using the same terms as this fuck and a lot of others who don’t believe in nb genders, even the “normal” ones
Damn op what’s the book called I wanna read that shit…….. never seen nonbinary rep irl
From the sounds of it the book being referred to here is Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin.
Riley Cavanaugh is many things: Punk rock. Snarky. Rebellious. And gender fluid. Some days Riley identifies as a boy, and others as a girl. But Riley isn’t exactly out yet. And between starting a new school and having a congressman father running for reelection in über-conservative Orange County, the pressure–media and otherwise–is building up in Riley’s life.
On the advice of a therapist, Riley starts an anonymous blog to vent those pent-up feelings and tell the truth of what it’s really like to be a gender fluid teenager. But just as Riley’s starting to settle in at school–even developing feelings for a mysterious outcast–the blog goes viral, and an unnamed commenter discovers Riley’s real identity, threatening exposure. And Riley must make a choice: walk away from what the blog has created–a lifeline, new friends, a cause to believe in–or stand up, come out, and risk everything
Another book that comes to mind with a genderfluid main character is Mask of Shadows, by Linsey Miller.
I Needed to Win.
They Needed to Die.
Sallot Leon is a thief, and a good one at that. But gender fluid Sal wants nothing more than to escape the drudgery of life as a highway robber and get closer to the upper-class–and the nobles who destroyed their home.
When Sal steals a flyer for an audition to become a member of The Left Hand–the Queen’s personal assassins, named after the rings she wears–Sal jumps at the chance to infiltrate the court and get revenge.
But the audition is a fight to the death filled with clever circus acrobats, lethal apothecaries, and vicious ex-soldiers. A childhood as a common criminal hardly prepared Sal for the trials. And as Sal succeeds in the competition, and wins the heart of Elise, an intriguing scribe at court, they start to dream of a new life and a different future, but one that Sal can have only if they survive.
I’m trying to keep this list reasonable but I’d also suggest checking out Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series. It basically follows the main character Magnus in his afterlife as an einherji, one of Odin’s undead warriors. Magnus is a pansexual son of Frey, once homeless soon dead, going on quests with a Muslim Valkyrie who’s a daughter of Loki trying to balance both her faiths, her half sister and his lover, genderfluid shapeshifter Alex Fierro, along with a deaf elf and fashion obsessed dwarf.
So anyway OP you can go fuck yourself and also these books sound cool.
@sapphicauthor was ‘symptoms of being human’ the one you got at gay’s the word?
It was!
It was a fairly good read but ought to come with massive trigger warnings (for constant homophobic, transphobic and lesbophobic slurs, and transphobic violence culminating in rape). Seemed to me that scene was only really included for shock value as Riley could have been motivated for the ending some other way very easily. Potentially the scene was included in order to raise awareness of sexual violence against trans people, but this would really have been much better coming from a trans author not from a cis guy.
It read much more like a book trying to educate cis people about being genderfluid and about how sad and terrible and dangerous being trans is, than it did as a book for trans teens to find rep. Indeed the author says in interviews that he wrote it after hearing his friends say transphobic things.
As much as I agree with everything else people said to argue against the OP, I personally wouldn’t be recommending Symptoms Of Being Human!
I do want up see more genderfluid books, however, I also don’t recommend symptoms of being human
I’m a bit confused at OP’s surprise that grown adults write books. I mean, that’s just … who writes books? Like, normally?
But seriously: I so wish that there had been the vocabulary we have today to describe gender when I was growing up. Back In The Day (we’re talking Nixon/Ford/Carter administrations, here–I’m old as fuck) all we had was boys on the one side and girls on the other. That was it. No room for kids who didn’t conform to either of those, and no vocabulary for non-cis kids to describe themselves or understand who they were. Just a lifetime of trying to find a way to fit into boxes that weren’t meant for you, and no way to understand why you didn’t fit. And that’s a fucking difficult way to grow up.
So yay for genderfluid characters in YA! And for gay characters! And trans characters! And every other kind of character!
Representation matters.
Giving kids a vocabulary to understand themselves matters.
Books that talk about this kind of diversity are important and necessary.
