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2 Recent YA Titles on Sexual and Gender Identity: None of the Above and Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda

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I’ve read two books recently that tackle some element of gender or sexual identity. Since I’m still not entirely on in terms of wanting to write in-depth reviews — partially because I’ve been reading a lot lately and want to keep up with that pace and partially because writing reviews feels like a risk more than a reward — I thought I’d talk briefly about both, with their strengths and weaknesses. Both of these books are available now, having released earlier this week.

Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Let’s start with a lighter-hearted YA novel about a gay boy who is trying to figure out who spilled the beans about his sexuality. Well, almost spilled the beans — someone knows he’s gay, but since he’s not out, he’s paranoid about who it is who knows the truth and what that person may or may not do with it.

The romance that builds between Simon and Blue, the boy who he’s been in an email relationship with, is really sweet and well-drawn. It grows at a realistic pace, and I love the way we’re able to see into the way they begin trusting one another and sharing pieces of their day-to-day as well as bigger wants in life.

There’s drama in this one, but it doesn’t feel manufactured. Simon is playing the role of wingman to one of his classmates in order to try to keep his sexuality under wraps (he’s convinced he knows who knows and this is one way of staying on top of it). There’s a nice thread throughout this one about friendship and how friendships can shift and change. Simon isn’t a perfect guy, and even though he’s finding himself in a tough spot, he’s also putting some of his closest friends in a hard place, too: he’s spent less and less time with them as he’s become somewhat self-involved.

The one drawback for me as a reader, which will likely not bother teen readers, was that some of the middle sagged a bit. While it was well-written and at times witty (this is a charming book all around), I found the high school friendship/relationship challenges a little drawn out for me. I’d have liked it a tiny bit tighter. However, I’d recommend this one without hesitation, and I think teens, especially gay teens, will love seeing a story like this. Simon’s parents are noteworthy, too — in fact, they might be some of my favorite YA parents in a long time. It’s worth noting, too, coming out is a part of this story.

This is a debut that makes me eager for Albertalli’s next title.

None of the Above by I. W. Gregorio

Were this book out when I was a teenager, I would have eaten it up. Even as an adult, this was a hard one to put down because it was so fascinating.

When Krissy and her boyfriend try having sex for the first time, it hurts. And it’s more than a first-time-having-sex kind of pain. Since Krissy’s mother isn’t around, she doesn’t have another woman she can talk to this about, so she seeks out the help of one of her female friends, who recommends she seek a gynecologist. It’s at the appointment where Krissy learns that she’s not a female; rather, she’s intersex — she has a vulva and vagina, but she lacks a female reproductive system and instead has internal testicles. She’s 18, so her medical access alone makes sense, but her father does learn about her condition and it’s then she’s left to make the choice about whether to have surgery to remove her testicles or not.

There’s more than the diagnosis, though. The pitch for this book is Middlesex meets Mean Girls. It’s the Mean Girls part that ramps up the drama in this title — Kristin thinks she can trust her friends with her diagnosis, but it turns out that someone spilled and she’s become not just a laughing stock at school, but she’s bullied. Her boyfriend feels utterly betrayed, and he calls it off with her. Even later, when she’s able to try to talk to him alone, outside of school, he’s still reluctant to accept her as she is.

This is a book about how people can be cruel and unaccepting of those who don’t fit into neat societal boxes. Gregorio’s book isn’t afraid to be feminist, and readers who pick this up will likely be fascinated by intersex individuals. I stopped numerous times to do a little research, and Gregorio weaves in the stories of other intersex people through Krissy’s connections via an online listserv and an in-person meeting with another person.

The writing reads like it’s from the voice of an 18-year-old girl, which at times doesn’t come off as fluid or outstanding as it could. But this isn’t a book readers will seek out for killer writing; this one is about character and about the story we rarely, if ever, see or hear. This is a must-add to collections.

About The Girls Around The Web

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Here’s a round-up of some of the posts I’ve read over the last couple of weeks that fit into the question of “what about the girls?” Some have been sent to me and others came up in my own daily reading. I’ve also included a post I cowrote with Preeti Chhibber at Book Riot at the end, which gives practical things you can do to promote female writers you love, be they published authors or budding creators.

If you’ve written something that fits recently, feel free to link to it in the comments. I’m staying away from linking to reviews, but any thoughtful commentary, round-up, or responses are totally worth a share here. I’ll let these do the talking for themselves:

  • Girls Behind Bars Tell Their Stories (I just finished Ross’s book and it’s so, so good. Get this for your collections. It’s worth the price. Ross does this all on his own.)

Let’s Move Beyond the Gender Binary: Guest Post by I. W. Gregorio

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Since gender has been a topic through some of the posts this week — and a topic we talk about frequently here at STACKED — let’s round out this week of contemporary YA with another post about gender. . . and about sex. Welcome to upcoming debut author I. W. Gregorio. 







I. W. Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above (Balzer & Bray / HarperCollins, 4/28/15). She is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books™ and serves as its VP of Development. A recovering ice hockey player, she lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.iwgregorio.com, and on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram at @iwgregorio.












Anyone who’s ever walked down the aisles of a toy store knows that the gender binary is a monolith that is almost impossible to topple, and I admit freely to being someone who’s tried and failed. For the first two years of my daughter’s life, I clothed her preferentially in non-pink clothing. I gave away onesies and bibs that had the word “princess” on it (once, I even took scissors to cut them out). Instead of dolls, I got her Thomas the Tank Engine trains and Legos.

Then she started preschool, and she’s now a princess-loving, pink-wearing girlie girl who is begging for an American Girl doll for Christmas. Which is fine, except that I fear that her internalization of stereotyped “girliness” won’t stop at toys and clothes.


The gender binary is insidious, impacting our everyday lives in countless ways. I struggle against its restrictions every day in both of my professions. As a female surgeon, I encounter it when my colleague makes an offhand comment about how he prefers it when I don’t wear scrubs (as they’re “so unflattering”). As an author, I see it on the shelves: books are divided into “girl books” and “boy books.”


Binary thinking does harm to both women and men. The stereotype of women as submissive, nurturing caretakers has caused generations of girls to grow up thinking that to be assertive is to be bossy, and that their education and employment is less important than that of their male counterparts. Likewise, damage is done to men who go through life being called “sissies” for showing emotion, or daring to like musicals or art or literature. The gender binary also contributes to homophobia, by dictating who people “should” love, and transphobia, by failing to recognize that one’s biological sex doesn’t always correlate to gender identity.


The truth is that men should be allowed to wear pink, and women shouldn’t have to fear being labeled “butch” for wanting to play football. Pigeonholing certain traits as masculine or feminine is self-defeating, and prevents all of us from being our truest and best selves.


Some people defend the gender binary by saying that it’s based on biology. If gender stereotypes were restricted to the fact that men need jockstraps and women require bras, I’d be fine with that. But there is no biological reason, for example, why girls should prefer the color pink or books with skinny girls wearing dresses on the cover. Indeed, studies have shown that the presence of personality traits like assertiveness, empathy, and interest in science don’t significantly differ between men and women.


The dagger to the heart of the gender binary, however, is the fact that most men and women have physical traits specific to one sex only, but not all. There’s an exception to every rule, and in this case it’s the existence of intersex conditions in which people are born with sexual characteristics that are neither wholly male or wholly female (PSA: In the old days, people used the term “hermaphrodite,” which is inaccurate and considered offensive by most of the intersex community). For a great primer on intersex, please read this FAQ from the Intersex Society of North America.
For a long time, intersex has been invisible in popular culture because of the fear and stigma surrounding it (one exception is Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex). But things are changing – MTV recently revealed that one of its main characters is intersex, and just last week the press reported on an intersex woman with a connection to Michael Phelps. I have conflicting feelings about the press coverage of the Phelps case, for reasons well articulated here, but I am encouraged by the increased visibility of intersex and transgender people in the media overall.  


The gender binary isn’t going to disappear overnight. It can only be dismantled and undermined slowly, story by story. That’s where we have the responsibility as authors and readers to seek out literature that shows us that gender isn’t a binary – it’s a spectrum. Not everyone who is born with XX chromosomes is attracted to men, identifies as a woman, or has a uterus. To assume otherwise ignores the biological diversity of the human race.  


In an essay for PEN/American, I wrote that the first gay person I ever met was in a book (Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn). The same is true for the first intersex person (Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex), and the first gender-fluid person (Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy). I am so grateful to all of these books for opening my mind to the spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation. But the binary-busting books don’t stop there – they include novels about girl football players, like Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen, and picture books about little boys who love wearing dresses like Sara and Ian Hoffman’s Jacob’s New Dress.


To read about others is to know them. To know them is to expand your world. Here’s to reading books that show a world beyond the gender binary. Here’s to showing our kids that girls can have masculine traits and that boys can be feminine, too.

By the way: Recently my daughter started Tae Kwon Do lessons. Her favorite color is now black.  

Boy Meets Girl: Guest Post by Lamar Giles (author of Fake ID and Endangered)

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How often is it that female authors are asked to talk about how they write male main characters? Let’s flip the script this time and see what a male author has to say about writing a realistic teen girl character. Welcome Lamar Giles!




Lamar “L. R.” Giles writes stories for teens and adults. He’s never met a genre he didn’t like, having penned science fiction, fantasy, horror, and noir thrillers, among others. He is a Virginia native, a Hopewell High Blue Devil, and an Old Dominion University Monarch. He resides in Chesapeake, Virginia, with his wife.


Fake ID is available now and Endangered will be available in April. 








Awhile ago I was on a panel talking about my new book ENDANGERED, which will be out in April. I was discussing the protagonist—Panda—and how “she” does this, and “she” does that. During the Q&A, an audience member raised her hand and said something along the lines of, “So, you’re writing a girl? Are you worried about that?”
Well…I wasn’t until then. 
I answered her question more elegantly than that—and because I write suspenseful things, I’ll hold off on telling you that answer. Instead, I’m going to focus on the broader topic, writing outside of one’s gender, and the trio of FAQs that often come along with it.
1) How do you do it? One word at a time (rimshot!)
2) Why? Because “write what you know” only takes you so far.
3) Should you be allowed to? Of course, and anyone who tells you you can’t should be plucked squarely (but gently, we’re not ruffians here) in the forehead.
Now that that’s out of the way, I told that audience member…Wait, what’s that? You’d like a little more detail on the how, why, and should questions. Some useful advice. Well, okay.
Whenever someone writes a character who isn’t a mirror image of themselves there’s inevitably the questions about the writer doing that character justice and/or should they have even attempted to write so far from their own purview? This concern is relegated mostly to writing outside of one’s gender or race (because no one has a problem with paunchy introverts writing about superheroes who  live in dystopian futures and lead freedom fighters against corrupt governments). Because of my involvement in diversity movements, I’m often asked to comment on who’s allowed to write about what. My unwavering answer—write what you want. 
No one should be able to dictate what happens between a writer and the blank page other than the writer herself. 
However, the second part of my unwavering answer is be prepared to get called out if you’ve been lazy on your research, relied on stereotypes to flesh out your characters, or been wholly offensive in your portrayal. 
Seems risky. Feels risky. Why go there at all?
I can’t speak for other writers, but I always want to grow, moving beyond my comfort zone. Nick Pearson from FAKE ID, I can write about him all day. There’s a lot of me in him. Panda comes from a different, harder to reach place. But…
NOT BECAUSE SHE’S A GIRL.
Because she’s had stuff happen to her that I’ve never experienced. Because she does things I could never do. The way she processes information is way different than how I do. These are exciting things to get into when you’re writing. 
Though, that doesn’t make me exempt to what I’ve said before. I could’ve gotten something wrong, I could’ve written some stereotypical things, I hope I won’t offend anyone, but you don’t know until it happens.
So, was I worried about writing a girl? Not really. I told the audience member, at that long ago Q&A, that I didn’t think of Panda as a girl, but as a person. Her own person. She does things, says things, and thinks things that Panda would think. Did I pull it off? 
I’ll worry about that another day.

Advocating for and writing about girls is a radical act

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I’ve been thinking about this tweet a lot the last couple of weeks.

 

After AO Scott wrote about the death of the patriarchy and the death of adulthood, peppered with some disdain for YA, it’s hard not to see that the act of writing about and caring about girls is anything less than survival writing.

 

It’s a radical act.

 

Scott and fellow “adulthood is dead” author Chris Beha believe that our media and culture aren’t encouraging people to behave in certain, pre-defined ways that signify adulthood. That people — “people” meaning anyone who isn’t a middle age, straight white male — keep seeking out entertainment and experiences that keep them in some state of arrested development. YA books, of course, are a medium undermining the patriarchy and delaying maturity.

 

Last week, news came out that two female librarians were being sued to the tune of over $1 million dollars for character defamation for speaking out about a male colleague who, over the course of many years of his career, caused discomfort among many females in the field. The lawsuit claims the women “have caused him to be regarded with feelings of hatred, contempt, ridicule, fear, dislike, approbrium or disesteem. The defendants’ statements are clearly defamatory and impossible to justify.”

 

Rabey and de jesus, the two female defendants in the case, spoke up where other women in the field have not. This act of speaking up is radical. They spoke up on behalf of other women who couldn’t find their voices to do that. Murphy’s lawsuit, as much as it claims to be about defamation of character, isn’t that.

 

It’s about power and putting fear into not just Rabey and de jesus, but it’s an act of creating enough fear that other women won’t speak out against him or others. It’s about keeping them quiet.

 

At the same time this lawsuit unfolds, YouTube personality Sam Pepper released a video featuring him pinching girls’ butts without their permission. After mass uproar within the community, the video came down, but in its wake, more women spoke up. Laci Green detailed Pepper’s creepy behavior, and as this things go, she received a series of messages from Pepper meant to put her right back in her place.

 

One reason that YA books bear the brunt of cultural criticism and become a popular whipping boy in mainstream media by people who couldn’t be bothered to read beyond the few books on the New York Times List or those books that became box office hits is that it’s a field that’s seen as a women’s field. Like librarianship, writing for teenagers is something that women do, something that the luxury of time and love of fantasy worlds — whether real fantasy or imagined fantasy is up for debate — afford them.

 

YA stories, at least the ones critics are familiar with, don’t leave room for boys and boyhood. They don’t wrestle with the big questions of life. They aren’t handbooks to adulthood or compasses for morality. They’re frivolous works so many adults gobble up by the armload because adults can no longer grapple with the Big Important Questions Of Life as found in tomes of literary excellence.

 

To bear witness to other adults enjoying the act of reading and finding stories that satiate them is to bear witness to the dumbing down of culture.

 

An email came through on a small, private listserv I’m a part of a couple of weeks ago from a librarian tasked with running a book club as an elective in her middle school. The students, 8th graders, are all girls, and the first title they picked was Speak. The librarian was told from above she needed to pick something less controversial, and when her students discussed other options, they picked Before I Fall. She knew that wasn’t going to fly with administration, either, so she came to the listserv asking what could be done.

 

It’s interesting that the books these 8th grade girls want to read in this private (and Catholic) school involve two huge issues: sexual assault and bullying. These are topics these girls are seeking out to talk about and because of administrative push back from the top, they’re not able to do so in a safe space, in the presence of a professional who knows how to handle conversations like this.

 

This is no fault of the librarian. It’s the fault of adults who are failing to have these conversations with teens. When our educational system is founded on teaching the classics and heralding the value of those Tomes of Literary Importance, readers who want more — who deserve more — have to go elsewhere.

 

Meanwhile, some readers are “so sick” of rape books in YA and it’s a topic that’s already been done.

 

What can we make of readers who are desperately seeking out these books in a culture that doesn’t want to talk about them or, worse, is “so sick” of talking about them and seeing them? What can we make of readers — girls — who are constantly reminded that their interests are either controversial or silly?

 

This isn’t the fault of educators; it’s a weakness in the system of belief that the road to successful adulthood is through the voice and experiences of the straight white male. It’s the fault of a society that values and encourages a certain prescribed path and any deviation from it is, in fact, a failure of the individual, rather than a failure of such a singular, privileged perspective.

 

Bucking that norm is an act of survival. Choosing to write and to talk out against those in power is an act of radicalism.

 

The reason we need another rape book, the reason we need to talk about books like Speak or Before I Fall or Pointe any other number of books tackling tough issues through the perspective of teen girls is because that’s where teen girls find their voices. That’s where they’re able to see both the mirrors of who they are, as well as the windows into the worlds of those who look like them and those who don’t look like them.

 

Earlier this month, nude photos of many well-known Hollywood women were stolen and put onto the internet for public consumption. This was no leak; this was theft. The purpose of this theft was to prove power — the power that our world has over women, the reminder that no matter how successful, how admired, how talented you are, there’s always a way the world can bring you down. That if you’re a woman, you’re part of a man’s world, no matter how much of a stake you put into the ground, no matter how much you make your own.

 

And this week, just months after a vile, repugnant rant against successful women in the book world, Ed Champion harassed another female author, threatening to release the name of the person who had nude photos of her. And he did, before his Twitter account was suspended.

 

There’s no dead patriarchy in these acts. If anything were true about either Scott or Beha’s essays to be pulled in here, perhaps it’s about what adulthood looks like. Does adulthood mean reminding women that their bodies are always up for consumption? That they’re afforded no privacy?

 

Is it that when a man has power and is invited to speak on the library conference circuit, he’s free from being called out for behavior that’s left colleagues uncomfortable?

 

Is it that men are allowed to grab girls’ bodies without their permission for laughs and video hits, then follow up just criticism for that behavior with threats?

 

Girls shouldn’t fear for their lives when they’re just living them. Girls who are impassioned about their worlds, who want nothing more than to engage with their world, learn about that world, build empathy for this place and the people around them, who use their knowledge and their passion to give voice to their beliefs shouldn’t worry about their bodies — or their lives — being at stake for doing so.

 

And yet, because we’re asking for and raising our voices without waiting for permission to do so, it happens.

 

The reason there’s fear that “adulthood is dying” isn’t that the patriarchy is dead. Far from. It’s that voices are being discovered through media like YA fiction, sharpened and raised. Girls are finding good things are out there for them, but getting to those good things requires claws. That being unlikable isn’t a character flaw or a death sentence, but instead, a state of being, a way of pushing through, of building confidence.

 

Speaking up, advocating for, listening to, and writing about girls is an act of radicalism. It’s about building an adulthood recognizing that the world is layered and colored with millions of shades of gray and accepting that with better nourishment — including rape stories, bullying stories, sweet or sultry romances, magical tales — the better our world reflects us, rather than us trying to reflect a singular, reductive, and fabricated idea of the world.

 

Let’s encourage those fears expressed by Beha and Scott are things we get to see happen. Writing about girls and believing women is everything that they’re afraid of.

 

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When I speak about girls, I hope it’s clear that I also speak in defense of all along the gender spectrum who are marginalized.

 

Further reading: Anne Ursu talks about the power of empathy, about how Beha and Scott fail to understand that that’s the driving purpose behind literature, including — and especially — YA fiction. Sarah McCarry digs into whose pleasure is really at stake when it comes to the “death of the patriarchy” and YA fiction. Spend some time, too, with Robin Wasserman talking about “Girl Trouble.”