#IMWAYR: Fine!

So it took me six weeks to finish this book, plus another two to get the review written, plus one more between when I wrote it and when I posted it. Good grief! But it's not for a lack of quality on the book's part. This book is amazing and essential to read right now, and I'm excited to bring it to y'all's attention today!

Fine

A Comic About Gender

Written and illustrated by Rhea Ewing

Adult · Graphic nonfiction · 2022

Add it on Goodreads · Preview the illustrations

· · · The publisher says: · · ·

A vibrant and informative debut with “great documentary power” (Alison Bechdel), Fine is an elegantly illustrated celebration of the transgender community.

As graphic artist Rhea Ewing neared college graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: What is gender? This obsession sparked a quest in which they eagerly approached both friends and strangers in their quiet Midwest town for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, this project exploded into a sweeping portrait of the intricacies of gender expression with interviewees from all over the country. Questions such as “How do you Identify” produced fiercely honest stories of dealing with adolescence, taking hormones, changing pronouns―and how these experiences can differ, often drastically, depending on culture, race, and religion. Amidst beautifully rendered scenes emerges Ewing’s own story of growing up in rural Kentucky, grappling with their identity as a teenager, and ultimately finding themself through art―and by creating something this very fine. Tender and wise, inclusive and inviting, Fine is an indispensable account for anyone eager to define gender in their own terms.

· · · · · ·

(Content warning: The next two paragraphs describe current events and transphobia.)

I don't know how to talk about the horrible things happening in the United States right now. I had written three paragraphs about them, and I'm deciding now to cut a lot of it just because I feel like it will be triggering to y'all, and that's not worth it. But, like, this s**t is happening in my COUNTRY. It's reality. It's so bad and I don't know what to do except feel guilty and afraid whenever I think about it.

I need you to know that transgender rights are under vicious attack in the United States. In the month and a half since the Trump administration began dismantling all that is good and right in the world (which wasn't much to begin with), they have passed executive orders to eliminate trans military personnel, facilitate the deadnaming of trans students in schools, ban trans people from sports, eliminate government recognition of nonbinary gender identities, and eliminate access to gender-affirming care for people under 19. This Axios article has a summary of these orders. State legislatures are more than happy to jump on the Bigot Bandwagon™: the governor of Texas is threatening a school district with investigation for the non-crime of using a student's chosen name and pronouns, and Iowa literally just passed a law removing gender identity from their nondiscrimination law (so as to explicitly allow discrimination, I guess). There is still hope: the Trump executive order on gender-affirming care has been paused by a judge (I don't know about the others), and organizations like Lambda Legal are suing the crap out of the government to overturn these orders.

(End of content warning)

I think a lot of people don't know any trans folks and don't really understand trans experiences, so it's easy for them to think of the trans community as distant, and to turn the community into a scapegoat. And this frustrates me, because (a) trans people are wonderful humans just like everyone else, (b) just because you don't know any out trans people doesn't mean you don't know any trans people, and (c) when we fight for trans rights, we fight for all rights—our rights to be free of constricting gender norms, to exercise bodily autonomy, and to be our beautiful unique selves without government interference. The trans community has formed a vision of human existence that is expansive and liberating for us all—and that is where Fine comes in. This book is a marvelous, eye-opening look at the trans community, and what cis folks have to learn about it.

There's a few things I love about Fine. First, I just love the people in it. I've seen this book compared to Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, another excellent graphic nonfiction book about gender diversity, but Gender Queer is a careful examination of one person's experience, whereas Fine is a more overarching look at 57 real people's experiences, just one of whom is the author. I'm not proud of this (though I suspect it's true for many of us), but the subset of people I meet and interact with day-to-day is very demographically skewed (in terms of race, class, etc.). There are people speaking their truth within the pages of Fine who I most likely would not meet in real life. And I am missing out, because they are wise and brave and wonderful. I wish I could meet them all.

I think the format of Fine also works really well because each individual person is free to be as blunt and honest as they want. These perspectives aren't censored or shaped into a predominant narrative, and there are ideas in here that will challenge people of dominant and marginalized identities alike. But at the same time, it's always very clear in Rhea Ewing's skillful presentation that these are individual perspectives. None of these people are speaking for anyone other than themselves.

Fine covers a lot of ground in its 300-odd pages. It's not comprehensive in the sense that gender cannot be explained in 300 pages by 57 people, but it is comprehensive in the sense that it examines pretty much everything you could think of. There's chapters on what femininity and masculinity mean, on our experiences in our bodies (including gender dysphoria and gender-affirming care), on how gender intersects with race and our other identities, on trans people's experiences with bathrooms, on the ups and downs of queer community, and more. Ewing expertly stitches representations of their interviews together with snippets from their own lived experience, sharing how they realized over the course of writing the book that they cannot detach themself from this story, for they (and all of us) are living it too.

There's like three hundred bazillion things I would mention if I had time, but the last one I'll say is that I'm very glad Fine includes cis perspectives in addition to trans perspectives. (If you don't know, cisgender means not transgender, as in, your gender identity matches your sex assigned at birth.) Not because cis people like me need to see cis representation in order to engage with something (that's definitely antithetical to the whole point of this post). But because when you see the cis perspectives on gender in this book, you see how they are just as varied as the trans perspectives, with no clear dividing line between the two. We are already living out gender diversity, in the sense that no two people express their gender identity the same way. Trans experiences are just an extension of the same diversity we are already familiar with. (I think about this a lot with sexual orientation too. We're perfectly used to the idea that different people have different "types" or traits they're attracted to, so why are we so disturbed and horrified all of a sudden when one of those variable traits includes the other person's gender identity?)

Toward the end of this book, one of the featured interviewees discusses their frustration when people immediately accept their gender identity with no further questions. I resonated with this so much with my own sexual orientation, because I have a whole story and all this lived experience and baggage and wisdom and whatnot, but people have been taught not to ask about it. I get why—we're trying to keep people from prying, or from doubting someone else's experience. But I think I understood why this person in Fine was frustrated too. Not asking any more questions is a chance to evade the topic entirely, to be like, "OK, cool, you're nonbinary, awesome!" without truly trying to understand what that means to another person, or trying to see that person the way they see themself and want to be seen. Bouncing off of the previous paragraph, what I love about Fine's inclusion of cis perspectives is that it reminds us that we all have our own story about our gender, and we need to get used to speaking our own story and asking other people about theirs, rather than pretending none of this exists and there's two (or three) gender identities and that's it.

I'm going to share my own gender story briefly, not because it needs to be public knowledge, but because I feel fairly comfortable discussing it and I figure it might set a good example to put it into words. I identify as a cisgender man. I don't always feel comfortable with that identity, and sometimes I wonder if I'm nonbinary, or even fantasize about being a woman. But as of now, my identity is "man." I have male privilege but don't feel like I fit in with other men. I have some traits that are stereotypically masculine: wearing men's clothing and a men's hairstyle, being a nerd about cars and technology, being vocal (and a little stubborn) when I have ideas to share, unintentionally trying to keep a lid on my emotional expression no matter how much I already know that's unhealthy and against my values. And I have just as many, if not more, traits that are stereotypically feminine (and these are the ones that feel most "me"): being excited and passionate, feeling deep love towards people and wanting to care for them on an individual level, being romantically attracted to men (that's the gay part for ya), having plushies and dolls and a cute Pusheen keychain, usually reading books about girls, being anxious rather than bold and confident, and liking gracefulness and flowiness and applying those to how I move my body.

So now you've heard my gender story. And now I give you a gentle nudge to maybe consider your own. And then I give you a second nudge to read Fine, and see how your own unique gender story fits in among the myriad others out there, all of which lie not on a one-dimensional spectrum or two-dimensional plane, but within the infinitely-dimensional Rube Goldberg machine of a social construct that is gender.

Fine is an essential read for this time, and I promise it will give you a lot to think about.

Kidlit Lovers' Meetup!

Our tenth (TENTH!) Kidlit Lovers' Meetup is officially scheduled for:

Saturday, March 22

4-5 PM Pacific / 5-6 PM Mountain / 6-7 PM Central / 7-8 PM Eastern

Virtual (via Zoom)

As always, these meetups are a chance for us kidlit book bloggers and readers (and anyone else who wants to join in on the fun) to connect and discuss books, reading, blogging, and more!

Sign up for the meetup mailing list so you can get the Zoom link for this meetup and all future meetups as they are scheduled. (You can also click that link to learn more about the meetup format, if you're curious!) Just FYI, this mailing list is different from my mailing list for receiving blog posts.

Thanks so much for stopping by! ✨✨