Alex Gino’s George is hitting the shelves of US bookstores at a time when transgender issues are everywhere — high-profile trans women are occupying an important part of the media conversation, trans characters are cropping up in fiction more and more, and the media is beginning to confront the way it handles transgender reporting. The book, published by Scholastic, edited by David Levithan, and aimed at middle grade readers, aims to be part of that canon, but it’s important to have a larger conversation about who is included in trans media.
Gino says that they wrote the book they ‘wanted to read,’ reflecting a dearth of great trans books for children and a particular gap for middle grade readers. As trans issues become more prominent in the US, children are transitioning at younger ages — Frontline’s recent Growing Up Trans highlighted this for viewers across the country. Middle grade readers are at a complicated point of vulnerability as they start to come into themselves, come into who they are as people, and question their own identities.
For some young readers, gender becomes a pressing issue as puberty looms on the horizon and they start to identify the performative gender roles and social mandates that surround them, pulling away from what has been imposed on their by their parents. They’re forced to inhabit an environment where they feel uncomfortable with their genders — and historically, there was little they could do about it. Gender variant children were shoved into boxes and told to act normally, only realising that perhaps they were trans when they were older. Sometimes much older; each trans generation grows progressively younger, owing its freedoms to the work of the previous generation.
In George, the book straddles cultural divides along with identity-based ones. Melissa knows that she’s a girl, but everyone calls her George and treats her like a boy — the breaking point for her comes when she wants to try out for the role of Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web and the adults around her say she can’t play the role because she’s a boy. Confronted with adults who expect her to adhere to rigid gender roles even in fictional settings, Melissa has to find a way to communicate about her gender with the people around her, which involves coming out as a child, resisting pressure from adults, and making her voice heard, all of which can be frightening experiences for a young person told to obey and listen to adults without question.
The filling of a middle grade gap isn’t the only important part of the book. Gino does some elegant dancing around pronouns to ensure that readers understand who Melissa is from the start, and to highlight how difficult it is to be misgendered and consistently labeled with the wrong pronoun. As a trans author, Gino knows that of which they speak, both from past experience with being misgendered and current experience — Gino is genderqueer, and thus endures the constant misgendering that many genderqueer people are subjected to by members of society who have difficulty with pronouns beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’ Notably, in media coverage of the book, many outlets are attempting to make an effort to gender Gino correctly, but they still have to add an aside explaining Gino’s pronouns to preempt readers who might otherwise write in to complain.
For young readers who wince when they hear the wrong pronouns or struggle with who they are, this can resonate incredibly strongly, assuring them that they are not alone. The fact that George is published by Scholastic is particularly important, as Scholastic is a huge publisher in the United States, but even more critically, it’s a major provider of reading to schools and libraries. Children across the US attend Scholastic book fairs where they can purchase a variety of titles, and the publisher is the first choice for teachers and school librarians — Scholastic is making a statement by publishing George, and it’s also putting the book into the hands of readers who need it most.
As we look at a trans media explosion and works like George, it’s exciting to see trans issues cross the radar, but they aren’t happening in a vacuum. Certain kinds of trans stories tend to be preferentially told, including transition narratives like this one — which isn’t Gino’s fault, but rather the reflection of an industry that clamours for particular versions of trans stories. If it’s not transition narratives, it’s trans tragedies a la Boys Don’t Cry, designed to act as reader tearjerkers for those who view transness as something to be consumed, rather than something to be recognised and humanised.
Certain texts and narratives are notably left out. We see very few nonbinary characters (oddly enough, Levithan’s work is actually an exception to the rule), and we see very few narratives about trans people just being themselves while being trans. This is a frequent complaint with other books about those with marginalised identities, as such books frequently fall into the category of becoming ‘issue books’ — a category that’s not inherently wrong unless it’s the only narrative available — or of leaning so heavily on a character’s marginalised identity that she has no characterisation beyond that trait. Thus, for example, a character’s main identity and characterisation is that she’s Black, and we learn nothing else about her — we don’t know her taste in music, the art she likes, what she enjoys reading, whether she cooks, how she moves, what her voice sounds like.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing transition narratives, especially for middle grade readers, for whom it is an authentic and personal experience whether they’re trans themselves or interacting with trans people. However, when these are the only narratives that are really available to youth, or anyone else, it adds to the continued objectification and oppression of the trans community. What’s important for many of us isn’t transition, but what comes after — and young readers too need to see that life goes on after transition, that transness is a part of who you are and not the only thing you are.
George can’t be held responsible for this cultural and media problem, as it is the industry that’s demanding this kind of storytelling. The industry in turn is responding to the demands of the public, and members of the public need to change what they are asking for when they request trans narratives. Trans stories must be a part of the call for diverse reading, and actual trans people need to be involved in that call to articulate our own stories and to highlight the stories that people need to be telling. Books like George need to appear as part of a much larger literary canon, because otherwise, we’ll see no changes for the trans community.