Let's read: Gender Queer

[Inatrous]

Andy Weir wrote The Martian; Johnny Weir is a gay figure skater who designed some of his own costumes. She's referencing his 2010 Olympic outfit:

Me, a week ago: Oh haha, I actually gave this a second read through before posting this time, I will definitely avoid very silly errors in my work.

Also me: A N D Y W E I R.

I checked, and this was in my initial rough, too, the thing I wrote while staring directly at the comic pages I was commenting on. I must have just had The Martian on the brain that day.

That whole page is just so textbook 2000s/early 2010s nerd-girl culture it hurts, and reminds me of how today's socially awkward young women engrossed in fictional worlds don't stand a chance

I admit, this was an era of culture I almost completely skipped, which makes the whole zeitgeist hard for me to talk about in any depth. The only thing I can really think about, reading this, is Bimbos of the Death Sun, and how a huge portion of society seems to have taken the idea of trying to make fantasy a reality as advice rather than a warning.

Maia also kind of reminds me of some kind of weird church lady at times, but for gender instead of God.

Before getting into the comic proper, I did a little bit of nosing around, trying to find what Maia's native coloring style looks like.

No surprise, she has a pretty broad online presence under her real name. The most relevant for art finds were her RedgoldSparks account on Tumblr, and this web site, which looks like its related to her professional life as an artist.

I learned a couple of things:

For starters Maia does, in fact, know what black ink is, as shown in this anti-JKR rant that should have been published partly in 2019, and partly in 2023:



(archive)

(We also learn her reading impairment was supposedly caused by dyslexia.)

And in this "I love Kpop, and oh, I also finally got around to cutting off my tits" comic she wrote during Covid. It's still mushy weeaboo garbage, but the lack of lumpy, super thick blue line makes everything slightly less horrible.



(archive)

Guess upsetting her family over getting the breast choppa wasn't that big of a deal after all.

As near as I can tell, this traditional ink and watercolor look is actually hers, and it looks even better if you go back to 2017.



(archive)

A shocking display of decently drawn hands. More than that, you can actually see the buds of a competant, nice to look at style peaking through here. It's effemenant, and holds marks of all the bad choices that will one day eat her art alive, but I would probably be able to read a comic drawn like this without being driven up a wall. I was really convinced by this point she was always a hack, so learning she had actual talent not too long ago really ups my sense of disgust at what she makes now.

Before finally moving on to the comic, let it be said Maia should never be allowed to attempt realistic portrature:



(archive)

So the blue line shit is a digital art thing? Why? Seriously, I don't get it, just why?

• Back in the realm of Gender Queer, Maia had a wonderful time being JONNY Weir, the hairless ice skater, whose name I might have messed up.
• Only to then to have her joy come crashing down as she is forced to suffer the horrors of...the Gynecologist.

• Complete with a rare shot of what I suspect is something closer to Maia's real porportions. She likes to draw herself as perfectly flat chested and boyish, but that's really just another one of those little lies.
• Maia gets a very standard introduction to what the pap smear is and how the doctor plans to retrieve the cells, while secretly hoping she has a giant clitoris to prove once and for all she was born to like gays.
• Maia, you clicker trained yourself into a fetish in a way that would make Ivan Pavlov swell with pride. The amount of time and effort you put into fucking up your perfectly normal female sex drive is depressing.
• Maia's pretty nervous throughout, but once it starts, Maia suffers so horribly she ages fifty years in the space of a single panel.

• The doctor must have used one of those Super Satan death speculums there. You know the ones with the spike's on 'em? Those are the worst. I hear the latest batch can remote fire the chainsaw feature from fifty yards away.

Spoiler: P129

• I'm not sure where the line is for inappropriate content, but just to be safe, nude Maia getting stabbed through the crotch has been spoilered.
• It's as close as I've ever seen her come to expressing her emotional state with any real force, and using her art as the primary means to do it.
• It's also a show of how completely Maia has failed in her maturation. This is "But I can't stand periods, part 2." She still hates being a woman, and more specifically being an adult woman, and the misery she experiences when forced to confront that fact only seems to escalate as time goes by.
• By her own account, Maia briefly disconnects from reality after the pap smear of doom, then crawls into her car and cries for a solid half hour, and still isn't well enough to drive home after that.
• Stuff like this makes me almost wonder if she was diddled during one of those pride parades she went to as a teen. But at the same time, I just have serious trouble believing it.
• Everything I can find on Maia indicates she is nothing more over privalaged, maladjusted, incredibly high strung girl. The only one who has ever really caused her pain truly does seem to be...Just Maia. A lot of this misery is her own self hate and willful ignorance, whipping around every now and then to bite her in the ass.

• After this, Maia swears off inserting things into herself from that point on.
• Nope, never again, too traumatic. She just can't stand being reminded of her female genitals, it hurts too much.
• Except for masterbating. And oh, the sex toys. Can't forget those. And she'll have some real sex later on, so she's alright with that too.
• On one hand, a more accurate title for Gender Queer would probably be Self Loathing Hypocrite Bitch Queen, but on the other, I also kind of want to save that one for myself. Good names for your all-female heavy metal band are hard to come by these days.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Also me: A N D Y W E I R.

I checked, and this was in my initial rough, too, the thing I wrote while staring directly at the comic pages I was commenting on. I must have just had The Martian on the brain that day.

Could be worse, I guess.

Maia also kind of reminds me of some kind of weird church lady at times, but for gender instead of God.

This is very well-said. She's a frumpy church matron with the thinnest progressive veneer.

 

[Anonitolia]

And she'll have some real sex later on

how??

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I was really convinced by this point she was always a hack, so learning she had actual talent not too long ago really ups my sense of disgust at what she makes now.

This is a common symptom of Tumblr. If you haven't, you should check out Rory for another good example of a budding talent regressing out of laziness.

So the blue line shit is a digital art thing? Why? Seriously, I don't get it, just why?

Muh webcomics or something, I dunno. I see it around, too, drives me nuts at times.

Re: pap smears, I've heard enough horror stories of (female) gynecologists being forceful and hurting their patients down there that I wouldn't be surprised if she had a horrible experience for her first time. It's also possible she has a small vagina due to atrophy or other reasons, though every autistic woman I've talked to about it said it hurt.

If it wasn't for the fact this was in high school libraries, I'd be more praiseworthy of that one panel of her being skewered because that's also another thing I've heard from asexual autistic women about why they hate the idea of penetration. It's not that they have gender identity issues, per se, they just can't understand why women were designed that way especially since we're told all the time "oh, the first time hurts and there's blood tee hee" and then we're all like "Well then why the fuck should we do it if it's going to hurt???". Though I mean, there's a reason body horror commonly uses feminine symbolisms, it's a really terrifying image compared to the workings of the phallus.

Now if she was actually diddled, she might've (considered) mentioned it especially if it was a big bad man who did it to her, but if it was another woman, of course she wouldn't put it in. So I just think she was fucked by all the fanfics and yaoi she read that she truly didn't know anything about the female anatomy outside of "muh periods".

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

Re: pap smears, I've heard enough horror stories of (female) gynecologists being forceful and hurting their patients down there that I wouldn't be surprised if she had a horrible experience for her first time. It's also possible she has a small vagina due to atrophy or other reasons, though every autistic woman I've talked to about it said it hurt.

Outside of your doctor fucking up, it not that bad. Just uncomfortable and very strange if you aren't used to feeling of something in there. Kinda similar to getting blood work done. Hurts for a moment but the biggest issue is your nerves because you don't often feel anything like that and you aren't entirely sure how you supposed to behave.

I can how an autistic or just a late bloomer virgin would hate the experience. Getting your junk touched on the inside is going to feel off no matter. It's not supposed be exactly relaxing but if you can't relax it's going feel extremely uncomfortable. If you get super tense the doctor can't do much to make it better, they just have go for whatever is possible.

 

[Aunt Carol]

I can how an autistic or just a late bloomer virgin would hate the experience. Getting your junk touched on the inside is going to feel off no matter.

Also, an authority figure looking right atcha, genitals the #1 focus of attention, exam room lighting and everything.

Maia's undiagnosed self couldn't handle replacing a menstrual pad, and her only other crotch implementation was "vaguely hump through clothing and think about K-pop."

It's not for no reason that you see that meme among the they-FABs, "no pronouns * I do not wish to be perceived."

 

[Spangled Drongo]

It's also a show of how completely Maia has failed in her maturation. This is "But I can't stand periods, part 2." She still hates being a woman, and more specifically being an adult woman, and the misery she experiences when forced to confront that fact only seems to escalate as time goes by.

Disgust at the prospect that your own body is capable of sexual intercourse is a common one I've seen amongst young women who claim to be non binary and/or asexual - I'd imagine that as well as porn getting more and more extreme these days, it may also have to do with the clinical, "insert rod A into slot B" descriptions typical of sex ed classes, there's very little consumption on their part of material that goes into the romance and emotion involved, so it's understandable that someone who assumes there are no romantic feelings involved and it's simply for the purpose of making a male partner feel good or getting pregnant would be terrified at the prospect.

So naturally that's where the yaoi fanfiction comes in, it's made to appeal to these girls and their desire for romance and a relationship with a loving, caring partner, but because the relationship is between two men - since the assumption is the female reader is straight and would derive no pleasure from seeing naked women and the work is purely bean-flicking fodder - it only makes people like Maia even more afraid of their own anatomy. There is always teenage romance fiction, as cringeworthy as it may be, that goes into the emotional side of it, shojo manga included since Maia is/was a weeb, though I can only imagine that's losing popularity as straight relationships aren't cool anymore, "queer" is where it's at nowadays, though in the 2000s there was plenty of cheesy girl-meets-boy romance manga out there she could've enjoyed.

What's concerning is the fact that a twenty-something is thinking this, if she were younger it'd be more expected especially with all the messaging directed towards kids these days about sex and how having it makes you a real grown-up, but seeing it persist like that, it's not normal, and rather than being "affirmed" as a made up gender free of any of the scary sexual bits, anyone who thinks that way past their teen years needs psychological help. I wouldn't consider it out of the question that a very small minority of people are just naturally not interested in sexual relationships at all, these would be the actual asexuals, but most who call themselves that either have unresolved issues (trauma or otherwise) or are doing it for attention.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

shojo manga included since Maia is/was a weeb, though I can only imagine that's losing popularity as straight relationships aren't cool anymore, "queer" is where it's at nowadays

Four of the manga in the drawn panel were shoujo titles, so not all of them are straight shoujo romances or involve 100% straight characters (she's definitely schlicked it to the twincest-play in Ouran). I'm just more shocked that there weren't more BL titles in the stacks when you just know she has read a lot of or all of the Tokyopop BL titles from that time period, and there were quite a bit of them. Even Viz during that timeframe had a few titles like God Child and Descendants of Darkness.

 

[Inatrous]

This is a common symptom of Tumblr. If you haven't, you should check out Rory for another good example of a budding talent regressing out of laziness.

Wait, Rory? Is that the girl who made Captain America trans and was a total ass online, while being almost invisible in her IRL existence at Calarts? If that's the girl I'm thinking of, I thought her thread kind of died a few years ago, if she's active again, then I totally need to check it out.

I can how an autistic or just a late bloomer virgin would hate the experience. Getting your junk touched on the inside is going to feel off no matter. It's not supposed be exactly relaxing but if you can't relax it's going feel extremely uncomfortable. If you get super tense the doctor can't do much to make it better, they just have go for whatever is possible.

In all honesty, yeah. I'm not being very nice to Maia, but in reality, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that whole experience was an honest to God sperg out. I can see a sort of stress --> muscles clench --> stress more-->panic pattern happening in a way that could have caused both the pain and the exhaustion afterwards.

I also feel like if there was something physically funky with her genitals, we would know. That seems like the kind of thing that would both further her "not a real girl" delusions and further her status within her subculture. I can easily imagine Maia forcing her sister to color in some lumpy blue sketch of her extra special hoo-ha, if she did.

What's concerning is the fact that a twenty-something is thinking this, if she were younger it'd be more expected especially with all the messaging directed towards kids these days about sex and how having it makes you a real grown-up, but seeing it persist like that, it's not normal, and rather than being "affirmed" as a made up gender free of any of the scary sexual bits, anyone who thinks that way past their teen years needs psychological help.

I keep having to remind myself this person is an adult. She comes across as emotionally stunted in a way that makes me doubt her ability to function without her family to act as caregivers. She needed meds, a real doctor, and to be strictly kept away from pride parades and older "queer" friends of no known origin yesterday, but it's San Francisco and her parents are hippies, so that didn't happen.

I would feel pity, but she has such a grating personality, it's hard not to get wrapped up in how much I dislike her.

how??

TINDER

• After the soul destroying pap smear, we move on to Maia's post college life.
• The primary focus still seems to be hanging out and talking about boys, sex, and gender.
• Notably nothing about paying off school debts, getting jobs, or settling into serious relationships, all of which I would expect of twenty-somethings on their path to becoming real adults. We're still in tee-hee teenager land, and I'm not sure that speaks more to Maia's monomaniacal focus on gender, or the wealth and privilege of her environment.
• IRL it's probably both. I've yet to run into any portion of the comic where Maia seemed concerned about money. Plenty of dosh for Kpop, glitter, and costumes, but no real care about basic living expenses or food, despite being in a profession that isn't exactly famous for high pay.
• Nice to know her parents are rich, I guess.
• The only other thing of note here is that Maia is still trying to gauge how much sex she has relative to everyone else in terms of percent values. Which is not the most autistic thing she's ever done, but is still really weird.

• We are yanked from the post college life straight back to 14 year old Maia, with nothing but Maia's trusty hairdo to indicate to the reader we're somewhere other than the present day.
• Based off-screen friend slaps Maia down from her gender high once again, while simultaneously confirming Maia's been horny every since she was fairly young.
• The way the panels are placed makes it seem like her first exposure to pride parades was also four-fucking teen.
• On one hand, Maia a bit shit at timelines, and it's possible the "I was fourteen" line is referring exclusively to the first three panels, but not the third.
• On the other hand, it's San Fran, Maia was, by her own admission, getting into gender stuff by this time, and this is 100% the kind of thing teen Maia would want to attend.
• It would also explain where she learned all this shit so early and so young. It was more than just fujoshi club messing with her head, she was injecting herself right into the heart of what we would all come to know and loath as woke subculture right from the start.
• I'm still,for the record, pretty sure Maia wasn't diddled, but I've heard so much about what a fiasco these parade things can be, I'm willing to keep the possibility on the table rather than throwing it out.

• Real girls schlick off to Plato.
• Real girls schlick off to Plato SO HARD, they the endorphin rush from doing it just kind of peters out after a bit.
• She goes so far as to claim she flat out ran her imagination dry of cooming material as early as sixteen, necessitating a hiatus from flicking the bean at all.
• I'm pressing X to doubt on this one. I really struggle to imagine you could go cold turkey like that after ingraining a fetish that deep into your head.
• Secondly, did no one in this woman's entire life tell her that keeping a masturbation chart is not normal? Did no one ever manage to get it through her thick skull that this was not something you should confess to keeping?
• Well no, obviously not, but being forced to learn about how many hiatuses in Maia Kobabe's wank schedule were deliberate has actively cost me brain cells and I feel owed.
• She perseverates on this topic for a full page more before finally shrugging her shoulders and admitting to giving up on the sex graph once she hit college. Thank God.

• The only thing I really know about Oh Joy Sex Toy are vague memories from its write-up on the Bad Webcomics Wiki back in the day.
• (Off topic, but the Bad webcomics Wiki was how I first found Kiwifarms. One of the active members in the discussion section was a user here, I think, and and referenced the site in a thread I happened to be keeping up with. Good times.)
• Seeing someone choose how to spend their money based off what a webcomic, of all things, says they should is kind of wild. I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this aside from Maia, online or in real life.
• The subject matter is also very telling of what her reading habits have morphed into, IMO.
• we're not getting the full picture of the shit Maia read, I think, especially online. Even sites that mostly kept it clean had some fairly racy stuff. Google still mostly functioned back then, too, manga aggregators and scanlation groups dedicated to...particular tastes were much easier to find.
• But trapping your dragon boy in a box and starving him almost to death and using the twisted bond you get from "caring" for him in the aftermath to make him kill monsters for you isn't the kind of twee little image she's trying to build here, so anything like that which she did read would get skipped over or cut out.
• This is one of those cases where we're lucky Maia is stupid, or this and all of the following segment would have likely gotten the chop as well.

• Maia plays with the vibrator some, only to find it more uncomfortable than fun.
• This is reasonable.
• What's much less reasonable, is what she decides to do with it afterwards.

• WHY WOULD YOU SHARE THAT WITH YOUR SISTER!!!???
• UGH!!!
• EW!!!!
• THIS IS WORSE THAN THE PISSING IN THE FIELD BIT BY FUCKING SCADS.
• I mentioned this part upthread, and it's still just as nasty as ever. That is a device that was covered in slime. There is autism goo in the crevices now, and I can not believe Maia "reported for stank" Kobabe truly wiped it down well enough to get all of it out before handing it off to her sister.
• Who takes it with a smile, hopefully as an easy way to appease her nutjob sibling before secretly tossing that thing in the trash as soon as she knows Maia isn't looking.
• But, thing is, I've begun to doubt.
• I could justify what Phoebe does here as confused or awkward appeasement, but their relationship starts to get progressively weirder as time goes by. There's a point in the comic where Phoebe, the younger sister, goes underwear shopping with Maia, and is drawn as standing in the dressing room with her, watching while she tries them on.
• Then there's how even as a young kid, she was spouting stuff meant to comfort Maia when she was having a bad time.
• Outside of the comic, we know she's doing the lion's share of making Gender Queer readable by doing all the color work for the book.
• That, alongside a few other things, makes something about they interact with each other feel strange.
• While I don't think their relationship is sexual, something about is just kind of off, in a way that makes me worry Maia just might have kept that goddamn vibrator after all.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Real girls schlick off to Plato SO HARD, they the endorphin rush from doing it just kind of peters out after a bit.

Unsurprisingly, I don't think she articulated herself well here.

She's not masturbating so often to her classical Greek pederasty fantasy that it wears out; she's saying that the more she touches herself in a session, the less aroused she gets. This goes with the vague humping, and the picture here of her just thinking hard with her hands above the covers.

Again, this would make more sense in a younger kid. Thinking really really hard about an idea that you know is... something, but you're not quite sure what. And then it clicks and you figure out what part of the body is lighting up when you watch Labyrinth, and which parts of the fantasy you want to expand on.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Real girls schlick off to Plato.

Not just Plato, pedarasty. Maia unironically endorses pedophilia. This was around the same time she was reading her BL manga, too.

But we're the bad guys for pointing this out.

There's a point in the comic where Phoebe, the younger sister, goes underwear shopping with Maia, and is drawn as standing in the dressing room with her, watching while she tries them on.

I dunno, doesn't sound all that awkward if it's between sisters and she's trying to help give advice on it because she can see her sister's struggling with it. It would also suggest that Maia's relationship with her mother is so strained that she has to go to her sister for this, which would explain a lot. This would then further explain why she felt so comfortable just giving her a used vibrator, and it's not just because autism.

That Maia had no shame in mentioning this in her tell-all comic where she wouldn't take to harsh criticism against her dumb-assery well (if she's ever gone looking for negative reviews, and she probably has) definitely confirms her lack of comprehensive thought not just in literature. "Whaddya mean siblings don't actually do this???"

(I have no sisters, so honestly I don't know how common it is for sisters to talk about sex stuff with each other. Something tells me her hippie parents might not have raised their children to view each other as siblings.)

 

[Cnaiur urs Skiotha]

I feel like the book should be called “Asexual”, or just “Neurotic Aspie Late Bloomer” honestly. I know it’s futile to expect consistency from gender ideology, but I thought gender, sex, and sexuality were different things? It seems like Maia is primarily uncomfortable with her physical female sex characteristics and terrified of sexual/romantic intimacy. I don’t see anything about her being uncomfortable with a feminine gender role outside of sex, or having an unfeminine personality etc. For all the theorizing about how sex and gender are totally different (when convenient for a pro-trans argument) I wonder how many female enbies actually just have severe body image issues. This book is also making me wonder how many asexuals, especially women, just have anxiety issues around sex/intimacy. I feel like the image that gets sold to normies is that asexuals are just neutral/uninterested toward sex but otherwise mentally healthy, I wonder how many are actually neurotic wrecks like Maia who do get horny but can’t actualize IRL because of anxiety attacks. If they’re that way because of sexual abuse they have my sympathy but if they’re just immature, self-obsessed, endlessly ruminating panic spiralers like she is they should go out and develop some real problems

 

[invisibult plus+]

I know it’s futile to expect consistency from gender ideology, but I thought gender, sex, and sexuality were different things?

Yes, but what they actually mean depends on what's convenient for them at the time.

The only thing I can really add to this conversation is that between this girl (not mentally mature enough to be a woman) and Judith Butler, these people are desperately trying to pretend physical reality doesn't exist. They desperately want to believe we're ethereal ~philosophical bodies~ floating through ~spaces~ full of power dynamics that constantly shift from moment to moment. Judith Butler talks like "the penis" is just "the penis," not a genital that's part of an anatomical system, designed to reproduce with specific gametes, that function with specific hormones, based on specific conditions, which are in turn based on genetic and epigenetic aspects that aren't just XY, etc. Maia isn't that different; anything having to do with her reproductive system terrifies her. She really, really, wants nothing to do with it. Anything having to do with it is uncomfortable at best and painful at worst. Her solution to this is to blame it on "gender," essentially run away from it, and pretend her obvious psychological problems don't exist.

Of course your book got "banned," Maia. You and people like you spread your issues to children while calling them solutions. You bloviate on and on about "liberation" and "equity," ignoring the very real problems people like you propagate. But it's convenient, isn't it? The more kids get as fucked up as you are, the more "normalized" your issues get, and the more "valid" they'll be! Everything feeds into each other. Someone call Todd Howard 'cause it just works.

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

(I have no sisters, so honestly I don't know how common it is for sisters to talk about sex stuff with each other. Something tells me her hippie parents might not have raised their children to view each other as siblings.)

Depends on the relationship of course but in general sex isn't a completely forbidden topic. Not that sisters want to know about each others sex lifes, because gross, but a sister is often the least embarrassing person to ask awkward questions from and to admit you fucked up and you need help. Your siblings tends have seen you at your worst because growing up and are similarish place in life, so it's often easier than friends or parents. So unlikely to be anything super detailed or juicy but more "have ever felt not fresh down there" and "I don't know if he likes me or likes likes me and I'm too afraid to ask".

Also underwear isn't exactly sexual or super private between sisters. Underwear is personal of course but in general you get used to clothes getting mixed up, hand me downs, borrowing and so on. You also probably have seen them changing clothes and being involved with the laundry. A sister helping out with bra shopping means mom doesn't have to and everyone is more comfortable.

What otherhand is unusual is Maya is the one looking guidance from her younger sister constantly. The older sister is the one with anwers or tried stuff out on her own, especially when we are talking about teenager problems that are fast moving.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

What otherhand is unusual is Maya is the one looking guidance from her younger sister constantly. The older sister is the one with anwers or tried stuff out on her own, especially when we are talking about teenager problems that are fast moving.

Maybe, maybe not, I assume it depends on personality. A manga series I used to read on the regular involved the older sister asking/getting sex advice from her younger sister because the sister in question is promiscuous while the eldest was a virgin when she got married. (Dumb anecdote, but was the first I thought of.) The only thing that is off-putting about their relationship here is Maia handed down her vibrator and that's really gross, so let's just hope Phoebe only took it to dispose of it for her.

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

Maybe, maybe not, I assume it depends on personality. A manga series I used to read on the regular involved the older sister asking/getting sex advice from her younger sister because the sister in question is promiscuous while the eldest was a virgin when she got married. (Dumb anecdote, but was the first I thought of.) The only thing that is off-putting about their relationship here is Maia handed down her vibrator and that's really gross, so let's just hope Phoebe only took it to dispose of it for her.

That's why added 'consistently' in the end. It's perfectly normal that a younger sister might have her areas of expertise but advice from the younger to the older shouldn't be standard direction when you're still kids. One or two years make a huge difference in almost everything and you needing advice from someone significantly younger should raise alarm bells that you aren't doing great.

Yeah, that was gross and it's super gross that she is willing to admit it publicly. Like you are making both if you look bad.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

Outside of your doctor fucking up, it not that bad. Just uncomfortable and very strange if you aren't used to feeling of something in there. Kinda similar to getting blood work done. Hurts for a moment but the biggest issue is your nerves because you don't often feel anything like that and you aren't entirely sure how you supposed to behave.

I can how an autistic or just a late bloomer virgin would hate the experience. Getting your junk touched on the inside is going to feel off no matter. It's not supposed be exactly relaxing but if you can't relax it's going feel extremely uncomfortable. If you get super tense the doctor can't do much to make it better, they just have go for whatever is possible.

Eurofag here (so I don't know if it would have any consequences for her health insurance) , but little did she know, that she could have straight up refused this part, if she was that uncomfortable with it. The HPV infection and possible subsequent cancer are extremely unlikely to happen to someone, who had no prior sexual contact and under such conditions some gynos just skip this part. Different thing would be, if she skipped something in her story. Because when I read the book, the shift from careless childhood with no enforcement of gender rules straight to being uncomfortable with being female felt ...weird. It was like I turned two or more pages at once, that, or she's just a bad narrator. At least as I remember it.

It's not like refusing a drug or alcohol testing behind the wheel, no direct punishment comes from that. It's up to one's own personal responsibility.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Because when I read the book, the shift from careless childhood with no enforcement of gender rules straight to being uncomfortable with being female felt ...weird. It was like I turned two or more pages at once, that, or she's just a bad narrator. At least as I remember it.

I caught that too, but there were other parts of her childhood where an average reader would have questions. It keeps coming up in this thread, but her story reads like an autist trying to make sense of her life in retrospect, but not knowing which things were normal and which weren't. She's got some idea of normalcy, but it's from immersing herself in high school yaoi and other pooners' "I knew I was trans" stories. It's like she has realized that some things are just arbitrary social rules, so just go along with them, but she overapplies that to things that aren't normal.

Some doctors will let you swab your own cervix if your lifestyle is boring enough. This was a little while back, though, and remember it's told from the PoV of the specialist little not-girl, having her first pelvic exam. Maia likely got told what was going to happen, but as she said, this was also her realizing that she had a physical human body and not just a vague area that you hump on pillows while you think about gay men.

For the doctor, it was Tuesday, so they likely didn't realize this was more than just regular nerves. If Maia had an actual diagnosis of her brain problems, of which the gender stuff is a symptom, she'd be the kind to lead with that and ask for a family member to hold her hand for the exam. (Which honestly would have been good. This whole book is what happens when a wealthy family ignores their sperg in the era of the Internet.)

 

[Inatrous]

masturbating so often to her classical Greek pederasty

Excuse me.

Not just Plato, pedarasty

Fucking what???

You know after you two said this I took a closer look at that image and started googling for dirty Greek pottery. I knew that was something the Greeks did, but it never crossed my mind that that must be an under aged child. I just took a glance and reckoned it for a man who just happened to be small.

If I had any sympathy left for Maia, it's gone now. Screw this titless cunt.

I know it’s futile to expect consistency from gender ideology, but I thought gender, sex, and sexuality were different things?

I think my moment of epiphany in that regard came from the realization that the way a lot of these people use words often resembles the way people will use phrases like Abracadabra. What does abracadabra mean? Dunno. No one does, really. It' s just a collection of sounds used to indicate that the speaker is doing something magical. In the same vein, all those "gender" words are more tools to impress an idea onto an audience - That the speaker has special power, or special knowledge, and the ability to incant it into spoken form, more than they're a means of expressing clear ideas or intent.

I stopped using gender and words like it soon after I started thinking of them like that. I have no interest in participating in this particular magic show, and I'm tired of their tricks.



Before I get into the comic itself, I thought it might be interesting to stick some of Maia's Tumblr art. Her oldest stuff seems to be re-postings from a now deactivated Devientart account, under the handle Alex-tree, dated all the way back to 2011. I was expecting to catch her in a fib with the whole "I didn't know how to type until I was 18" thing from TPB 1, but unless an archive of her Alex-tree account is found with even older stuff, this would be coming from a Maia who's 21 to 22-ish.

Spoiler: Maia 2011-2012

She really should've stuck to that traditional, realistic style she had going on. It still kills me that she can draw for real.

There's also a bunch of what look like early Gender Queer comics, some of which didn't make it into the final, published print. Such as this one about how she could justify cutting out her uterus if she could only find a way to donate it to someone in need!

Spoiler: Early Gender Queer

Or this one, where Maia is having a good time being drugged and sleeping on the floor? Bed? Grey void thing?? With her sister. I had to cut this one into two due to my screen size, but the original is one strip.

Spoiler: Chopping of your boobs is awesome, by Maia Kobabe.

With some bonus Pheobe lore included. Apparently little sis does weed every now and then.

Finally, it turns out Maia had a comic she had published previous to Gender Queer, called A Thieves Tale. It's kind of weird she never brings this up in her memoir, since as near as I can figure, this was what really set her down the path of professional comic artist.

It also proves that Maia is screwing us all out of some rather nice background work.

Spoiler

There's a bunch more, really. I had to pick and choose what I wanted to include.

• When last we left off, our intrepid autist had just finished sharing a used vibrator WITH HER SISTER (still not over that) and deciding that sex toys were not for her.
• We get another brief break from Maia being weird about sex to Maia being weird about statistics. She keeps fairly detailed notes on what she reads, it seems, and was able to work her way through 1,786 books and comic books/manga over the course of ten years.
• I'm writing this sleep deprived, so I can't quite work the numbers, but just looking at it, that's decently high.
• Pity she doesn't seem to think about the words she's cramming in her eyes. How do you read The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, not once, not twice, but three times, yet reach over and over again for beautiful lies and easy power, without ever once thinking about a certain ring?
• One of the most valuable things books are supposed to do for people is teach them how to look and appreciate the world from alternate points of view, but as much as Maia reads, she seems immune to their ability to change people's minds.

• Maia discusses her feelings over being open about not being cisgender to a random lady.
• Like literally a random, unnamed lady, who's drawn to look like she's at least as old as Maia's mom.
• Who is this person? Where did she come from? How long have you known her? Maia? Maia, is this one of the people you met at pride parade when you were in your teens?
• Instead of answering these questions, Maia decides to discuss the idea of being ~genderqueer~ with her mom.
• I'm personally still stuck on the fact Maia has certain things she discussess with even hippier looking randos before bringing them up to her own mother.
• Hippie mom seems confused but supportive about the whole thing, but responds with surprise at the idea that Maia might hate her own body.
• Maia is all like "No, I don't hate my body, I just hate some of my body! It's totes different mom."
• 
• God, that eyeroll. Maia really comes across as such a brat. That's your mom, asshole, she's worried for you. Would it kill you to restrain yourself for ten goddamn seconds before shitting on the world's gentlest suggestion that maybe one day you could change your mind??
• I'm not down with how Maia's parents decided to raise her, but I do wonder to what degree they're aware of how messed up she really is, and how much their own idealogical moors prevent them from realizing the extremity of it. This sequence of panels makes it come across as if they legit have no clue what's going on inside her head.

• Moving on to year two of grad school and more fandom garbage, Maia gets introduced to One Direction, and in typical Kobabe fashion, procedes to get intensely obsessed.

• In a normal memoir, a page like this would have a lead into the author's trials and tribulations of completing a degree while struggling with the hospitalization of a relative. Or how devistating it was to loose an old friendship, with an extra aside of how the author faced their challanges to become who they are today.
• But this isn't a normal memoir, and rather than telling us who the hell got hospitalized or what the hell she did to destroy her friendship, Maia uses this page as an opening to a whole new arc focused on what really matters: Fanfiction.

• You go Maia.
• If in doubt, avoid reality and use make believe to cope.

Next time on GENDER QUEER: Maia faces down writers block with nothing but a tinder app to fight back against her deadly foe! Will she discover the secrets of romance in time to finish her work, or will 3D humans prove too powerful for our fujoshi queen?

Same gender time, same gender channel, tune in to disover if she succeeds!

Sorry about this one being short. I have a bit more free time coming up next week, and I'll try to use that get through more of TPB 2 than I have been. There are a few rather fun bits I've been looking foreward to getting to for a while now.

 

[Aunt Carol]

You know after you two said this I took a closer look at that image and started googling for dirty Greek pottery. I knew that was something the Greeks did, but it never crossed my mind that that must be an under aged child. I just took a glance and reckoned it for a man who just happened to be small.

She said specifically that it was Plato's Symposium, so I think you're just the high-minded kind of person who doesn't automatically associate ancient Greeks discoursing about Love with ancient Greeks fuckin' underage twinks.

I don't know if it helps, but she was almost certainly thinking of herself as the eromenos. Maia isn't the proactive type, plus it goes back to the whole "I can't be a woman because I have thoughts and feelings." The idealized version of ancient Greek pederasty was that women were lesser beings, but if you were having a relationship with a teenage boy, you were having a relationship with something cute that was still going to grow into a full citizen and thus worthwhile to hang out with.

Man, that seems like a lot for her to figure out and fixate on. Does anyone know if there's a manga based on the Symposium?

With some bonus Pheobe lore included. Apparently little sis does weed every now and then.

You don't understand; Maia took an entire Norco.

It's so obvious she's hanging around social media teenagers. So twee, like any Tumblr gendergirl doing slice of life comics.

But this isn't a normal memoir, and rather than telling us who the hell got hospitalized or what the hell she did to destroy her friendship, Maia uses this page as an opening to a whole new arc focused on what really matters: Fanfiction.

I said before that this comic needs a rebuttal/reader's guide that brings up how this is a sheltered sperg with no interventions. That reader's guide should superimpose Maia's age in big red numbers, every time the setting changes or there's a major plot point. The natural assumption to "I reacted to grandma's death by writing a lot of fanfic" is 14 or so; the reader needs to be reminded she's in grad school at the time.