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Gender Queer: A Memoir is an important contribution to the growing canon of queer graphic novels published in the first decades of the 21st century, including Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele’s Queer: A Graphic History (2016), and Melanie Gillman’s As the Crow Flies (2017). In Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe acknowledges the influence of both Bechdel and Gillman on eir own work, and in the narrative, Maia takes a course taught by Gillman during eir MFA program, positioning eirself explicitly within the long line of queer graphic memoirists.
 
In queer graphic memoirs like Gender Queer, the interplay of linguistic and graphic elements often allows authors to explore the areas of their queer experience that are difficult to articulate with words alone. Bechdel, a pioneer in exploring the queer potential of the medium, is obsessed with what can’t be said or known in Fun Home, juxtaposing visual representations of memories from her life with lush prose about her identity. The inefficacy of language in a gender-binary world is a theme threaded throughout Gender Queer, too, who uses Bechdelian strategies to examine eir genderqueer identity through new eyes. Kobabe often turns to graphic elements to articulate that which is elusive with language alone. For example, when words alone can’t contain Maia’s horror during a physical exam, e illustrates emself being impaled in a position of utter desolation. As a result, the graphic memoir is a medium through which queer identities and experiences can be both reimagined and articulated in new ways.

In 2020, Gender Queer won the American Library Association’s Alex Award, which is given to books written for adults that appeal to teens, emphasizing how graphic memoirs, which often explore themes around coming of age and coming out, are a bridge between young readers and the older artists who model how to make sense of one’s queer identity. Kobabe’s text is especially groundbreaking for articulating the specific confusion and triumph of growing into eir nonbinary gender identity. In an essay penned for NPR, Kobabe reflects on the ways the book has helped trans and nonbinary youth discuss their gender identities with their parents and has expressed gratitude for the support from those who enjoyed the book. The book has been taught in college courses in disciplines as wide ranging as literature, comic writing, gender studies, and even graphic medicine.

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