Maia Kobabe is the author, illustrator, and protagonist of Gender Queer. E is an academically and professionally trained cartoonist with an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Since entering eir undergraduate education in comics, Kobabe struggled with writing personal comics and revealing information about emself. Kobabe is asexual and nonbinary. These identities posed many problems for em growing up with no representation to help em understand emself.

Many of the vignettes from Kobabe’s life center on issues caused by this lack of information growing up. This ranges from sexual education centered on cisgender, heterosexual, and allosexual sex to a gender binary that only allows for people to be the gender assigned to them at birth. Kobabe often feels ashamed or frustrated by eir inability to grasp what seems normal and natural to others. Kobabe’s purpose behind writing Gender Queer is to share experiences that are often kept in the dark. This is why e promises to come out to eir students in the final pages of the memoir.