Touching and intimate. Kaye's comics have that wonderful panel alchemy, where two seemingly simple elements are brought together in a way that makes both of them bigger and richer. Her work has a gentle, intuitive rhythm to it. ( )

The thing I love about these comics is that they capture little moments that affect Julia‘s experience in big ways. Books like this, depicting the humanity of people‘s experiences with all the joy, pain, and self-growth, are so important not only for their representation, but because they reflect a mirror back on society. Kaye does a great job of giving the reader windows into her life experiences at the beginning of her transition, a lot of which are things we might all be able to relate to, to different degrees and in different ways. Highly recommended! ( )

Included in a blog post and resource list at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2019/06/10/non-fiction-about-gender-and-trans-e...

Let's be clear, I'm not transgender. I'm not young like the author. Neither have I ever been attractive like the author was before her transition and is now. More to the point, I tend to approach life from primarily two perspectives. The first comes from Andrew Carnegie, who supposedly (I can't confirm this) told his daughter, "Life will be so much easier for you once you realize life is hard." In my view, if you anticipate what might be hard, you can take steps, sometimes lots of steps, to lessen or eliminate that bit of harshness altogether. The second, and more dominant one comes from e.e. cummings (who Volvo decided to butcher recently in its car ad), "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." This book is a cartoon diary of the author's personal period of gender transition. It is full of emotional ups and downs. It's full of deep concerns about personal beauty and what others think of her. It's also full of obstacles that could have been anticipated, especially with the help of a decent gender transition counselor, who even the author admits at one point had not been doing their job well. Thus, as a reader of this book, my worrying about people no longer thinking I'm beautiful is not a factor for me, given "no longer" not being part of my equation. If I woke up tomorrow morning and found myself a different sex, I can't think of anything I would do differently beyond maybe a few personal hygiene matters. Nor would I ever tackle something so personally monumental as a gender change without preparing for all its obstacles. I'm old, so people half my age having their eyes glaze over when they found they were stuck having to interview me for a job is ancient history, and I don't depend on pleasing others to maintain my livelihood, so I don't have to act like a person I have never been and will never be. And yet, two-thirds through this book, I finally noticed that the library had categorized this volume as "Young Adult", meaning it was aimed straight at the totally insecure population at its peak of insecurity. So, sure, let someone who is already deeply insecure read about someone deeply insecure working through her insecurities. That makes sense. Personally, I think the recent movie, Eighth Grade, does a far superior job at presenting this, but, if the point of the book is about specifically working through gender transition, surely this can only be a regarded as a rather superficial starting point of thinking about it, both for the potential transitioners and the persons surrounding them. In the meantime, I salute anybody fighting "the hardest battle which any human being can fight" in being nobody but themselves. ( )