Society as a whole is becoming much more open about trans and LGBT issues and teen/YA lit is definitely leading the way in terms of representing alternative sexualities and gender experiences. But, argues site member Tomboy007 , it needs to be more sensitive to those seeking to transcend the gender binary

Why does it matter whether you’re a boy or a girl? But it does. It really, really matters. People want to know which one you are.

Alyssa Brugman wrote the YA novel Alex As Well about an androgynous teenager who explores the possibility of breaking through the two binary genders which we as a society are so often pushed to box ourselves neatly into: “male” and “female”, as well as the polarisation enforced by the stereotypes often associated with them. Brugman’s character Alex often expresses the need for the use of female pronouns (“she”, “her” and “herself”) and explains that she considers herself to be far more female than male in her gender identity – but never completely commits to identifying as one gender or the other:

Sometimes I don’t know what I am. But what I would like to be on the outside, what I want other people to see – is a girl.

As heartbreaking as this dialogue is, it’s necessary for many teenagers growing up today and struggling to articulate how they feel about their own bodies. Brugman explained that one of the main aims of this novel was to “make people reflect on what we think is ideal in the body”. The subject of gender identity is of particular interest to me as I identify as gender fluid.

Gender non-conformity is something that individual people have of course felt for many years, but we as a society haven’t addressed it openly until very recently; much expression or discussion of anything that lies between or outside of the gender binary remained, until a few years ago, a taboo subject.

Now the issue is becoming more widely acknowledged, encountered more frequently in conversation, and this shift is partly due, I think, to YA’s increasing willingness to represent characters who identify like this.

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It is estimated that 3 in every 100,000 people over the age of 15 in the UK identify with some form of gender variance. However these figures only take into account those who have sought medical treatment for gender dysphoria; it seems likely that many more people experience some form of gender fluidity without seeking medical help.

There are many different gender identities that fall in between or outside of the male-female binary. Examples include gender fluid (in between the gender binary; the person’s gender changes and can also fluctuate over time), genderqueer (anything between or outside of the gender binary – a catch-all term), gender-neutral (feeling neither male nor female, in between the gender binary), or agender (feeling completely outside of non-binary and binary gender, identifying as having no gender at all).

These are only basic definitions and the terms can mean different things to different people. There are also many more gender identities; the identities which I have listed are the most commonly referred and related to. (It would be great if we could all just “be” but until then society will need to make room for these other gender identities).

While there are quite a few YA books written about people who transition from one binary gender to the other, Alex in Alyssa Brugman’s novel is the first explicitly gender non-conforming person that I have come across in YA fiction. This is not to say that there are not others, but they are very few and far between. Alex just is:

I can see where this is going... because I am Alex as well... I want to be beautiful. I want other people to think I am beautiful.

Alex refuses to present as, behave like, or define herself in terms of either one or the other, male or female – the first literary character that I have come across in YA fiction to be open and conscious about doing so; she describes the concept of her gender as a “grey” area in between “male” and “female”.

Alex is with me. The other Alex. I am Alex as well. We are the two Alexes. I guess that’s confusing for a lot of people. Sometimes it’s confusing for me too.

This pleases and frustrates me in equal measure. I am glad to see a gender non-conforming character represented in a book - but I am also frustrated that she did not arrive earlier. I was 21 when I read the novel (first published in the UK in January 2015), which was about four years too late for me.

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I know that some of you will definitely be reading this and screeching: “But what about Every Day?!!!”. For those who don’t know, David Levithan’s book focuses on A, who inhabits a different body, a different gender, and a different environment – in short, a different person’s entire life – every single day. But this is not exactly the same concept as exploring genderqueer identity through a character in a novel. My reasoning for this is the fact that A’s environment changes every day as well as their gender. While these changes are very clever elements of the story, they inevitably stop Levithan from exploring gender identity in very much detail (although some of the emotions that A feels are inevitably similar due to the changes they go through day-to-day), so I don’t think this novel is a full exploration of non binary gender.

In the same way, Meg Rosoff’s novel, What I Was, should be considered here. The storyline focuses on two teenagers: Hilary and Finn, who apparently develop a strong, loving friendship while Hilary is at boarding school. Through the course of the novel, we realise that Finn is (potentially) a gender non-conforming character and Rosoff’s aim, just like Lisa Williamson in The Art of Being Normal, seems to be to challenge gender stereotypes as opposed to writing a character who rejects the gender binary altogether.

Frankie Alan (left), played by Ruta Gedmintas in Lip Service. Photograph: BBC/Kudos

The character that I aspired to during my late teenage years was, interestingly, never openly said to be gender non-conforming, but she was the closest that I’d found at 17 and I interpreted her as such. I took (and still take) a lot of inspiration from her on-screen wardrobe and demeanour: Frankie Alan, a mysterious, dangerous character on BBC3 drama Lip Service. Played by Ruta Gedmintas, the character gave me the vision that I craved at the time: a young woman who looked and dressed very androgynously, had short blonde hair and was the epitome of a tomboy (a label I often use for myself in place of “gender fluid” or “genderqueer”, particularly in situations where I would rather not discuss my own experience of gender difference but feel the need to allude to it in some way).

More recently, Ruby Rose has starred in Netflix drama Orange Is The New Black as Stella, an openly gender fluid-identifying character. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a gender non-conforming character has been played by an actor who openly identifies as gender fluid herself (Rose uses female pronouns).

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As amazing and fortunate as it was that I had Frankie Alan as a role model of sorts who was on TV every Tuesday night (as well as my mother’s defiant stance against “pink is for girls and blue is for boys”), and as great as it is that kids today have series like OITNB, I still feel there needs to be more representation of non-binary people in literature and not just on our TV screens. There is far more scope to explore a character’s gender identity within a 300-page novel than in a few hours of a TV programme. There is more space and time to explore the character’s inner feelings and we, as the readers, can get right inside the character’s head in a way that TV never can. It means that while TV can provide role models, only books can help questioning teens understand and work through the complexity of their emotional situation.

Representation of gender nonconformity in the media is getting better every day, and YA is definitely leading the way in terms of representing alternative gender experiences. However, I still feel that there needs to be more understanding of genderfluidity in literature. If Alex had come along earlier, a lot of teenagers might have found growing up just a little bit easier – and that’s the bottom line.

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