Few books have faced as much resistance as Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. The American Library Association reports that Gender Queer was the book they received the most requests to remove from libraries in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and it still ranks third for 2025.
In itself, Gender Queer is not a controversial project: the book is a graphic memoir based on Kobabe's upbringing in California, from childhood into early adulthood. Maia, who has no clear concept of eir own gender, is forced into increasingly gendered patterns: at first clothes and toys, then puberty, falling in love, and sexual practice. The story follows Maia on the long search to find emself, in relation to gender expression and sexuality, but also as an adult and as an artist.
Gender Queer immediately became a queer classic when it was published in 2019. Kobabe writes honestly and vulnerably about the journey to understanding eir own identity as non-binary and asexual, and has helped an entire generation of young people who are uncertain about their own gender and sexuality feel less alone.
Maia Kobabe is an American illustrator, comic artist, and author, and a former librarian. Eir major work Gender Queer has won a long list of awards, and has so far been translated into 16 languages. The book has been challenged and banned from libraries across the US, something Kobabe has met with a simple response: queer youth need queer books. What role do art and literature play for young people’s search for their own identity?
Nora Dåsnes is also an author, illustrator, and graphic novelist. She has explored queer identity and love herself, among other things in the comic diary Cross My Heart and Never Lie, which, like Gender Queer, has been awarded the American Stonewall Book Award.
She will meet Kobabe for a conversation about identity, censorship, and drawing your own life.
The conversation will be in English.
