Let's read: Gender Queer

[Aunt Carol]

I may be a retard for asking this but were they using "kobabe" as a pronoun like kobabeself or just using her name to AVOID pronouns?

The latter. A pronoun replaces a name, so if you just use the name instead it might sound weird, but you won't have to change it when they have another gender fit.

 

[Cnaiur urs Skiotha]

Ayyy we're back! Thanks for braving the genderless wasteland once again for our entertainment Inatrous. Time to sperg once more.

I agree that the way Maia counters Aunt Shari's feminism with an appeal to the academic authority of Patricia Churchland is pretty gross. Maia seems averse to any kind of critical or rigorous thinking in general. Her main criterion for accepting or rejecting an idea seems to be whether it causes her anxiety, rather than whether it appears likely to be true. You've thankfully spared us four pages of an infodump that I assume loses quite a lot of coherence in the process of being lifted from a "neurophilosophy" book, filtered through Maia's low-IQ yaoi mush brain, and put in comic book form, but I assume most of Churchland's book has nothing to do with "genderqueerness" and Maia is just cherry-picking any part that seems to defend all the opinions she had already held before reading it, assuming she understands it at all.

To be fair, though, I don't think Aunt's Shari's concern, although a valid feminist critique of the non-binary trend in general, really applies to Maia. It's not so much that society's devaluing of women got into her head - in general I find Maia spergishly oblivious of what society thinks of anything. Again, I think her problem with being a woman is A. fear of adulthood and B. hatred of her physical body. What she really needs is some 1990s-2000s body-positive Vagina Monologues type feminism. As a little shithead teenage boy in that era I thought it was cringe at the time, but my god does the idea of accepting and loving your physical self, even when it's imperfect, seem so wholesome compared with the post-2010s idea that everyone has a right to do chemical and surgical experiments on themselves until they have the ideal body.

As for the pronoun stuff, you're right on that the "pebbles in the shoe" metaphor doesn't work because what she's really asking is for other people to constantly take the pebbles out of her open-toed sandals as she drags her feet through a gravel pile. She can maybe train friends and family to modify their language at least when she's around, but strangers are always going to clock and "mis"gender her. Again, we come back to the fact that it would be much more realistic to just accept reality the way it is instead of trying to force it to conform. I really wish someone had given her the Tao Te Ching instead of Neurophilosophize your Way to Genderqueerness or whatever. At its most basic level Maia's problem is that she's an anxious ruminator who expects the world to change whatever it is that's bothering her. I've seen no sign that she's even considered the idea of letting things go and instead changing her own perspective and reaction, you know, things she can actually control.

And finally, aside from all the theory sperging I just want to take a second to make fun of Maia for her reaction to overpriced Harry Potter backpacks that make it look like you're carrying a huge, immobile owl around on your back for some reason. The whole thing is so clearly pitched at kids, from the way they call it an "adoption fee" to the lame joke the shopkeep presumably makes every time ("It will always have your back!"). A normal adult would roll their eyes when the guy says "$40", not have them turn into hearts when he says "adoption fee". Maia is such an embarrassing, squealing, dopamine-mainlining, cartoon heart besotted dumbass whenever she sees something childish and mildly cute she can consume. It's the boys' underwear scene all over again.

The irony is that it's women who more often get a pass on this kind of arrested development being still cute into their 30s, whereas men who do this shit at the same age as Maia are (rightly) considered turbo-losers. Enjoying that female privilege Maia? Personally though as I've said I think her whole nonbinary thing is an excuse to stay a child forever, that's the true "third option" she wants, not woman or man but eternal sexless child.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

i find it odd she depicts herself in the comic as looking very juvenile. maybe that's just me, but it just doesn't sit right with me

 

[Spangled Drongo]

What she really needs is some 1990s-2000s body-positive Vagina Monologues type feminism. As a little shithead teenage boy in that era I thought it was cringe at the time, but my god does the idea of accepting and loving your physical self, even when it's imperfect, seem so wholesome compared with the post-2010s idea that everyone has a right to do chemical and surgical experiments on themselves until they have the ideal body.

Going to possibly powerlevel a bit here, but having been nearly indoctrinated into the gender cult as a teenager myself I'm going to respectfully disagree with that one - what helped me was realising we're so much more than just our bodies, that you can exist comfortably in your physical state while also being an individual with your own thoughts and feelings and personality, that being female is so much more than just bleeding every month and being able to have babies, your thoughts are as much a part of you as your physicality is and there's no such thing as a "genderless brain", it's simply called having a personality and there isn't a person alive who perfectly fits gender stereotypes. This was in the early 2010s, right before the prevailing message shifted from "love your body! The vagina is sacred!" to "have as many medical procedures as you want if it helps you feel better about yourself" and all feminism meant to me back then was hairy legged lesbians telling straight women to dump their boyfriends and join the dyke club, and vaginas/uteruses plastered all over everything, and that was the last thing I wanted to see since I did not want constant reminders of my biological reality shoved in my face all the time. If it's just the general sentiment, however, I do agree - there's surely a way to give would-be transitioners that same sort of message but without the in-your-face coochie imagery.

Though maybe it's different for grown-ass women who still feel that way, idk, I've known a few people who stuck with the gender bullshit way past their teens and all I want to tell them is to grow the fuck up and start thinking critically about what they're doing to themselves.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

i find it odd she depicts herself in the comic as looking very juvenile.

Because in her eyes, children are androgynous and that's what she wants to be seen as. And her arrested development isn't coming from a trauma in childhood unless not having access to daily bathing was what caused her to become self-conscious about her body.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

Because in her eyes, children are androgynous and that's what she wants to be seen as. And her arrested development isn't coming from a trauma in childhood unless not having access to daily bathing was what caused her to become self-conscious about her body.

Come to think of it... it kinda reminds me of Audrey Hale's manifesto (the pooner shooter).
Despite the obscene references to sex and all, there's also a fixation with describing herself as a "boy". Not a man, really specifically a "boy".
I wonder if it's really common in pooners, or perhaps a characteristic of a certain subgroup of them.

 

[Free the Pedos]

I'm pleased to see Erika Moen and Bechdel mentioned in this thread, though I would say the latter has much more to say and says it better than the former. Maia's way of writing and illustration is so reminiscent of Moen to me, though perhaps that's because they're part of a wider community of women who draw people like gingerbread men floating in space while they ruminate anxiously over gender, and not because Maia copied Moen.

 

[Owls Owls Owls]

a more accurate title for Gender Queer would probably be Self Loathing Hypocrite Bitch Queen

I'm glad this thread exists and that so many others agree on how fucked up this girl is. I am 100% convinced she's not receiving more pushback from the mainstream because no one wants to use her fucking extra-retarded pronouns, and not doing it means opening themselves to wah wah transphobia crying.

She's such a texbook autist she sounds like a parody of the condition, except she's real. Like, if Stephen King wrote a book about a developmentally arrested Millennial who has made multiple life choices based on her love for gay fanfic, it'd be called hacky. But here is Maia, proving that reality is stupider than fiction, and with the publishing contract to prove it.

Re-reading this thread I remembered how fucking insufferable she is, made worse by the comics from other places that I hadn't seen before. Like someone else said, changing her pronouns changes nothing about her female anatomy, just makes her more annoying to deal with to the people around her. Top surgery's the same. How are the scars not an even bigger sign to everyone around her of how female her body is?

 

[Old English Roast Beef]

Query: why does she seem to have an African-sounding last name? From a quick search I couldn't find "Kobabe" in surname dictionaries.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Query: why does she seem to have an African-sounding last name? From a quick search I couldn't find "Kobabe" in surname dictionaries.

Maia "Remove" Kobabe.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

To be fair, though, I don't think Aunt's Shari's concern, although a valid feminist critique of the non-binary trend in general, really applies to Maia. It's not so much that society's devaluing of women got into her head - in general I find Maia spergishly oblivious of what society thinks of anything. Again, I think her problem with being a woman is A. fear of adulthood and B. hatred of her physical body. What she really needs is some 1990s-2000s body-positive Vagina Monologues type feminism. As a little shithead teenage boy in that era I thought it was cringe at the time, but my god does the idea of accepting and loving your physical self, even when it's imperfect, seem so wholesome compared with the post-2010s idea that everyone has a right to do chemical and surgical experiments on themselves until they have the ideal body.

Man, I always thought that feminists shoving vaginas over everything was creepy, and that if guys were talking about their dicks constantly and constantly making penis art, they would be considered perverts.

How would this make Maia less of nutcase?

If anything, having hippy parents made all her problems worse. How do you screw up so bad that your daughter needs to have a counselor explain what deodorant is?

Query: why does she seem to have an African-sounding last name? From a quick search I couldn't find "Kobabe" in surname dictionaries.

Kobabe seems to be an alternate spelling of Cobabe.

Super white, obviously.

 

[Free the Pedos]

If anything, having hippy parents made all her problems worse

I think she would’ve had a shot at a normal life if she had normal parents, even given the state of services for autistic kids 20 years ago. It’s obvious her hippie parents failed and enabled her, then said “we wanted you to be different from society—no, not like that!”

 

[Free the Pedos]

Seriously, stop moaning and take a shower already, would you? It's fucking gross

Do we know if/when Maia’s parents moved to a normal house? It seems there was no plumbing in the first house she described (hence the outhouse and filling with washing machine with a hose), so I have to ask if she even could take a bath. This was a shitty precedent to set for a little autist who needs to be trained to care about such things.

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

I think she would’ve had a shot at a normal life if she had normal parents, even given the state of services for autistic kids 20 years ago. It’s obvious her hippie parents failed and enabled her, then said “we wanted you to be different from society—no, not like that!”

Yeah, they say autistic girls are better at imitating normal behaviors. Being in a normie family in the suburbs might have helped a lot.

Do we know if/when Maia’s parents moved to a normal house? It seems there was no plumbing in the first house she described (hence the outhouse and filling with washing machine with a hose), so I have to ask if she even could take a bath. This was a shitty precedent to set for a little autist who needs to be trained to care about such things.

Around age six, and they lived in the house with no plumbing when she was three. So the formative years where kids are still working on hygiene were spent without regular plumbing. And she didn't go to preschool or kindergarten, just got dropped in first grade after literally getting raised in a barn.

 

[Owls Owls Owls]

Oh God can you imagine how insufferable she's going to be when menopause hits? "As I reach my dreams of infertility, it's as if my body only does it with a struggle, every hot flash feeling like a curse lain on me by a dying creature's final breaths, a sweaty reminder of the tragic femininity of this vessel. When oh when will it finally free me from its grasp? But hey I have chin hair nice."

 

[nothing outside the text]

I actually read this comic several months ago, can't believe I missed this discussion. Really enjoyed the art criticism in the OP.

I didn't really expect all that much from someone who identifies as gender queer, but I was still surprised by the lack of anything even resembling character development/growth. For all her endless navel-gazing, her self-awareness is nonexistent and her character never truly develops beyond her discovery of her uwu special gender identity. She remains as oblivious about herself and the world around her as she was in the beginning; she just learns to be content with her obliviousness.

Also, she seems to have spent more time trying to figure out which pronouns "feel comfortable" than doing literally anything else. She says she's hoping her pronouns would influence how other people perceive her, but she tragically never matures (neither intellectually nor emotionally) enough to realize that not only perception doesn't work like that, but that her main problem isn't how others perceive her - it's her own genuinely disordered self-perception and relationship with her body.

 

[AfghanBlue]

If Strange Aeons ever TERFs out, maybe she could do the footnoting this book deserves.

Got to be at least crypto at this point.

I just read the first half of this boring shite that was available and decided it wasn't even hateread interesting enough to wade through the mire of hentai pop ups on my phone to get to section 2 and read however much mroe of it. Utterly uninteresting and I hate the TIF aesthetic and ideology that the most mundane of shit is earnest and deep.its not, you're a smelly sperg, and even with all that honesty you couldn't scrape something interesting to say.

Whne you're drawing pictures of grotty pads and talking about dried old blood like coffee grounds..
That and the bit where she gets pulled into the office about her BO brought bakc gross memories of school, our resident stinker was horrendous, yes we knew when she was on her period, summers were intense and horrible. One of my mates sat next to her in English, we sat behind, there was a fan on when it was the height of summer on the empty space beside us, and the poor lass would turn and gulp the fresh air. It finally cracked where she had to tell the teacher to have a word. That took such a long time to do because obviously it's awkward for everyone and even if you don't like a girl (smelly girl sucked as a perosn too) it's unpleasant and awkward to have to take that information to a teacher and lay them the responsibility of telling her.
And yes, she came in stinking of men's deodorant the day after too.

All this to say, this bitch must have stank so badly to have it brought up. People will do anything to avoid telling someone they smell.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Utterly uninteresting and I hate the TIF aesthetic and ideology that the most mundane of shit is earnest and deep.its not, you're a smelly sperg, and even with all that honesty you couldn't scrape something interesting to say.

This book needs an annotated/expanded/rebutted version so badly. Footnotes, fact-checking, and like we were saying earlier, big red numbers saying Maia's age whenever it changes/she does something insane and a skimmer would think this is a dorky 12-year-old, not a grad student.

Then it can be required reading among non-woke parents and the people who were clutching their pearls about a drawn strap-on can realize that this whole book is an autobiographical self-own and that this level of the Pit of Gender is spergs who need to grow up. And what to watch for in their own kids.

All this to say, this bitch must have stank so badly to have it brought up. People will do anything to avoid telling someone they smell.

The tween/teen years in school are probably the best place to have to tell a non-relative they stink. Kids are dumb and often need to be explicitly reminded about hygiene, so the counselor probably has more practice at this than anyone else. The kid will graduate and be gone in a few years anyway. When it's a boss who doesn't want to talk to a 10-year employee, that's when it gets bad.

 

[AfghanBlue]

This book needs an annotated/expanded/rebutted version so badly. Footnotes, fact-checking, and like we were saying earlier, big red numbers saying Maia's age whenever it changes/she does something insane and a skimmer would think this is a dorky 12-year-old, not a grad student.

Then it can be required reading among non-woke parents and the people who were clutching their pearls about a drawn strap-on can realize that this whole book is an autobiographical self-own and that this level of the Pit of Gender is spergs who need to grow up. And what to watch for in their own kids.


The tween/teen years in school are probably the best place to have to tell a non-relative they stink. Kids are dumb and often need to be explicitly reminded about hygiene, so the counselor probably has more practice at this than anyone else. The kid will graduate and be gone in a few years anyway. When it's a boss who doesn't want to talk to a 10-year employee, that's when it gets bad.

I honestly can't deal with stinkers. I seem to have developed a really weak stomach over the years, honed by having a strong sense of smell, but not it's at the point where people's body odour has made me actually puke twice.
I physically can't be in the space with them. I feel really sorry for people who genuinely can't help smelling but I think they are extremely rare. Actually I'm not sure. It's the sort of thing you never get into details with to find out with the smelly person themselves, due to running in the opposite direction with immediate effect.
Watched a sad documentary from about 2004 about a lass who had some fish smelling disease who had been basically hiding out in south asia for the lower hygenie standards, but came back the UK and it was just about her struggles of feeling gross despite doing nothing wrong. Anyway she met and married a man with no sense of smell which was really nice.
It probably usually just takes a chat to sort it out with most people, which is infuriating. How do they not know themsleves? How is it not very uncomfortable and for definite, more "dysphoric"?
Hopefully we will get some ex smelly kids showing up to chime in.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

People just don't like being told they stink, like they're either self-conscious of it or they think you're being mean about it even when they're bathing every day. It's a mix of hormones and diet in the majority of cases which right themselves out over time due to age or change in diet/life-style, something that was doable in Maia's case had her parents been more attentive. The rare case where smell is due to disease that can't be treated is sad and the person will need to be brave to be open about it more.

I do wonder if Maia's gotten better about her hygiene now, I think that's the most important thing about her growth I care about at this point since that was a huge issue with her growing up. I'm assuming she got better at it since it hasn't been brought up again, but who knows. She could've regressed after moving out.