Suffused throughout with a light touch that can best be described as genuinely tender, Maia Kobabe’s Lion Forge-published Gender Queer : A Memoir comes across as anything other than the seismic shift it is in terms of consciousness-raising — and maybe that’s what makes it one in the first place. Eschewing the polemic, Kobabe opts for the conversational and, as such, eir (Spivak pronouns — look ’em up if you must, I confess that I had to) story is universally accessible, but in no way represents a “dumbing-down” of its complex subject matter.

I’ll be the first to admit that as a straight white male I may just be the last critic on the planet qualified to comment on the story of a person slowly coming to terms with eir identity as a non-binary, asexual person, but by the same token, it’s folks in my shoes most in need…