New Re-Release of Maia Kobabe’s Graphic Novel ‘Gender Queer’

Amongst the attack on trans identities in the U.S., one of the most banned books in the country, Gender Queer, is getting a deluxe re-release.

The 2019 graphic novel, created by Maia Kobabe, will be re-released this coming May with new content and a slightly different title: Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition. According to The Advocate, the new edition includes exclusive art and sketches, a new cover, a foreword from ND Stevenson—writer of Lumberjanes and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—as well as an afterward from Kobabe. 

In a press release, Kobabe says, “For fans, educators, and anyone else who wants to know more, I am so excited to share Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition. Queer and trans cartoonists, comics scholars, and multiple people who appear in the book as characters contributed their thoughts, reactions, and notes to this new edition.”

Addressing the current state of U.S. politics, Kobabe states, “It’s been almost seven years since I wrote the final words of this memoir; revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well.” She also adds that she “ hope(s) readers enjoy this even richer text full of community voices.”

Gender Queer has been the most banned book in America for the past few years, following a wave of book bans all targeting LGBTQ+ and/or racial themes.

Kobabe tells The Advocate in 2022, “I’m really hoping that nobody ends up self-censoring themselves and being afraid to write your authentic true voice, or the story that you have burning inside you, for fear of being challenged later on down the line.”

The author says “You are the foremost expert of your own identity, and whether you are questioning gender or sexuality, maybe some other facet of yourself, or none of those things, you know who you are, and you are the one who has lived your own interior experience. Don’t let other people make you question yourself too much.”

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