Gender Queer was the last book an Australian council tried to ban. It’s still being appealed in federal court
- Written by Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University
Gender Queer, a graphic-novel memoir of coming out as non-binary, was at the centre of Australia’s perhaps highest-profile book banning furore in recent years – that is, before western Sydney’s Cumberland City Council banned books on same-sex parenting.
And Gender Queer’s status is still threatened: Bernard Gaynor, the conservative Catholic activist who led the call to ban it is taking the Minister for Communication and the Australian Classification Review Board to the Federal Court of Australia. The decision will come later this year.
Researcher Nicole Moore told The Book Show’s Sarah L'Estrange yesterday that, contrary to what many of us think, this wave of book bannings is not copied from the US.
Australia has a long history of book banning and before Gough Whitlam’s government in the 1970s, was “one of the most censorious countries in the English-speaking world”. For example, in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World (now a standard school text) was banned in Australia.
“We have a long history of Christian associations and churches organising to ban books,” Moore said, particularly citing sex, sexuality and gender as reasons. The Gender Queer ban, she said, provoked “concerns about some models of Christian understanding that are perhaps narrow in their models of how people should live and how books should express the ideas of gender identity and sexual expression”.
Sexually explicit illustrations, including of a sexual fantasy inspired by Plato’s symposium, are often cited (and taken out of context) by those looking to ban the book. But American author Maia Kobabe (who uses e/em/eir pronouns) told The Book Show that’s not why the book is so embattled. Rather, it’s the title, its comic form, its several major literary awards and that it’s a “happy” coming-out story “where I face no negative consequences from coming out”.
The book – which began life as “a well-received but minor debut book from a new author” – has become a story of censorship, culture wars, and of the way young trans lives have been caught up in ideology wars.
Gender Queer was banned in 56 school districts from July 2021 to December 2022.
Ted Shaffrey/AAP
PEN America claims “where Gender Queer was read in full, rather than challenged based on a few illustrations with sexual content, many districts and school boards across the country decided to keep the book”.
Five of the ten most challenged books in each of the last three years featured LGBTQIA+ content.
A community impact
It’s difficult to estimate how many trans and non-binary young adults there are in Australia. In 2022, the ABC reported there were just 10 referrals to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital for gender services in 2011. In 2020, that number was just under 500. In 2021 it was over 800.
In an afterword to the new edition, Kobabe writes,
Many of these pages hold things which at one time seemed like my deepest, darkest secrets, until I brought them out into the light and I realised they are just aspects of being human. The process of writing this book helped me figure out who I am. It also made me realise I am part of a wide community, all wrestling with the same questions.
It’s true that seeing ourselves reflected in literature might make us feel less alone. Other people’s stories help us find a shape and form for telling our own stories.
To me, the aesthetic appeal of Gender Queer lies not in the material details of Kobabe’s personal journey. Instead it is the reverberation between the dynamic figures at play inside and outside the text. Kobabe, the author, gazing benevolently down at her younger self. Maia, Kobabe’s character, gradually realising eir needs can only be met through the imperfect, hope-fueled art of authentic communication. Me the reader, and my own stories of periods, bras, pap-smears, body hair, masturbation, and feeling betrayed by my body.
And sitting outside this frame, the imagined young adult reader who might be the ghost of Maia Kobabe emself, seeing eir experiences mirrored for the very first time in the pages of a book.
Authors: Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash University 
