The Gender Wheel

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"A story about bodies and gender for every body"--Cover.
""This is our world. Like many things in nature it's round and holds everyone at the same time. This is the Gender Wheel. Like our world it's round and holds everyone at the same time too..." In 2010 Maya introduced the Gender Wheel and the Gender Team in the Gender Now Coloring Book. It was a jam-packed coloring extravaganza exploring bodies, nature and history in relation to multiple gender identities. It also opened up the possibility of play and expansion around our still limited language of "boy" and "girl." Now the Gender Team returns, expanded and stronger than before, inviting you on a picture book journey through the Gender Wheel. This body-positive book is a powerful opportunity for a supportive adult and child to see a wide range of bodies, understand the origins of the current binary gender system, how we can learn from nature to see the truth that has always existed and revision a new story that includes room for all bodies and genders. The Gender Wheel offers a queer-centric, holistic framework of radical gender inclusion in a kid-friendly way for the budding activists who will change our world. This is our world!"--Amazon.com.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Great Idea, Ineffective Execution submitted by Meginator on June 23, 2023, 11:46pm This book presents an inclusive, easily understandable framework for understanding the interrelatedness between the physical and emotional aspects of gender, using the idea of an all-encompassing set of circles to cover every unique combination that makes individual people who they are. While the final wheel itself is an incredibly useful tool for readers of all ages, I frequently found the book’s presentation to be disjointed and confusing. Maya Gonzalez situates the gender wheel within the broader idea of circles in nature, but never directly connects the idea of natural cycles with the idea of gender as a combination of various layers, and she only offers definitions of terms at the very bottom of the relevant two-page spreads instead of inserting them where they pop up in the text, which could create confusion for the younger readers who are the book’s apparent target audience. The ample text is accompanied by bold, colorful illustrations, but the layouts can be confusing and often crunch a lot of words into limited horizontal space, making some of the pages quite difficult to parse. I do think that the core ideas from this book are worth the occasional struggle of actually reading it, and its generous spirit consistently shines through, but several elements of its construction and design add unnecessary difficulty to what is, at its core, a surprisingly simple yet expansive view of gender.