In the past few years, nonbinary fictional characters have become increasingly common in literature, television, and other areas, including in books and programs intended for children. In just the past week, anti-trans activists have made quite a lot of noise complaining about children being exposed to these characters, because apparently the pronoun they is too risqué for innocent little children to hear.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that, while nonbinary characters are starting to appear much more frequently nowadays, characters of this kind—even ones meant for children—are nothing inherently new. Characters who are at least arguably nonbinary appear in some of the oldest surviving works of literature from ancient Mesopotamia and one of the earliest emphatically nonbinary characters in a work of English-language children’s literature appeared over a hundred years ago, in a work by a children’s author who is still quite famous today.
The controversy over the new mascot for Hertfordshire libraries
In August 2022, the libraries for the county of Hertfordshire, England, announced their new collective mascot: an adorable, multi-colored cartoon alien named “Tala the Storyteller,” designed by a group of recently-graduated local artists as a replacement for the county libraries’ old mascot, the “Bookstart Bear.”
An article published by PinkNews quotes the purpose of the mascot as being “to inspire families with babies and young children to visit Hertfordshire’s 46 libraries,” to “borrow books and to join in with the variety of early years family activities, such as Rhyme Time,” and to appear on a “my first library card” for young children.
ABOVE: Image of Tala, the adorable new mascot for Hertfordshire libraries
In any sane world, this new mascot would have attracted no controversy. Unfortunately, we do not live in a sane world. Over a month after the libraries announced the new mascot, an upset mother from Hertfordshire apparently contacted the anti-trans activist Maya Forstater over the fact that someone had apparently referenced Tala using the gender-neutral pronoun they (which, as I discuss in this post I wrote back in May 2021, has been used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English since the early fourteenth century).
Furious, on 29 September, Forstater issued a spectacularly bizarre tweet, in which she incorrectly states Tala’s name as “Talia,” incorrectly describes them as a “trans bear,” and assails Hertfordshire libraries for adopting them as their mascot. The Twitter account for Hitchens Library (one of the libraries in Hertfordshire county) promptly responded to Forstater’s tweet to clarify: “Tala isn’t trans, they are an alien.” Forstater responded to this, saying:
“The parent who messaged me told me she was told ‘Tala is non-binary’ and ‘uses they/them pronouns.’”
The Hitchens Library Twitter account responded to this, clarifying:
“These are true things. Tala is a storytelling alien from outer space, so neither male nor female.”
Forstater then proceeded to spend the next four days continuing to have a meltdown on Twitter about how Tala the fictional cartoon alien is nonbinary and how this is supposedly a dastardly attempt to indoctrinate innocent children into “gender ideology.”
What makes this whole meltdown even more hilarious is the fact that, over a hundred years ago, no one would have batted an eye at this sort of thing—and we can know this because similar fictional characters actually appeared in children’s literature over a hundred years ago and no one was upset.
The only reason for the present controversy is because transphobes have falsely come to regard the existence of any intelligent being who is anything other than a cisgender male or cisgender female as inherently sexual, dangerous, and inappropriate for children, even if the being in question happens to be a literal freaking alien.
Gender-ambiguous characters in ancient literature that minors would have read
Gender-ambiguous characters in literature who are at least arguably nonbinary are as old as literature itself. As I discuss in this post I wrote in October 2022, one of the oldest surviving works of narrative poetry in existence is the Sumerian poem Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld (ETCSL 1.4.1), which may date to the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE), although the oldest surviving copies date to the Old Babylonian Period (lasted c. 1894 – c. 1595 BCE).
In the poem, the goddess Inanna descends into the underworld and seizes the throne of her sister Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld. A group of divine judges known as the Anuna deem her guilty of a crime (the nature of which is not totally clear) and they condemn her to death. She turns into a corpse and her corpse is hung on a hook.
After three days and three nights, Inanna’s devoted sukkal, or personal attendant, Ninshubur, following instructions that Inanna gave to her before descending to the underworld, goes to all the most powerful and prominent gods in the pantheon and begs them to rescue Inanna from the underworld. All of them refuse, except for the god Enki.
Enki uses the dirt from underneath two of his fingernails to create two gender-ambiguous cult personnel figures of Inanna known as the kur-yara and the gala-tura. (In the later, significantly abridged Akkadian-language adaptation of the poem, Enki only creates one cult personnel figure: the kuluʾu, who is similarly gender-ambiguous.)
Enki sends these beings to slip through the door into the underworld like flies. There, he tells them that they will find Ereshkigal lying in extreme pain from childbirth. He tells them to console her in her suffering, make her promise that she will give them whatever they want, and then ask her to give them Inanna’s corpse. Then he tells them they must give Inanna the water and the plant of life to bring her back from the dead. The kur-yara and gala-tura do exactly as Enki tells them to and they successfully bring Inanna back from the dead.
The extant text of the poem holds a great deal of ambiguity. It never really explains why Enki needs to create the kur-yara and the gala-tura to rescue Inanna or why he can’t just send people who already exist. One possible (although speculative) explanation is that there might be some kind of rule that no man or woman can enter the underworld and come back out alive. If this explanation is correct, then, since the kur-yara and the gala-tura are neither clearly men nor clearly women, they are able to evade the rule, go to the underworld, and come back out alive.
During the Old Babylonian Period, Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld was part of the prescribed curriculum for students training to become scribes. Scribal training during this period began at a young age with lessons in basic reading and writing, with students eventually working their way up to reading, copying, studying, and memorizing advanced texts.
Because Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld is a more complicated literary composition, students most likely would have encountered it in the later part of the curriculum, as adolescents. This means that adolescents undergoing scribal training in the Old Babylonian Period would have encountered a text containing these gender-ambiguous and possibly nonbinary characters.
ABOVE: Detail of an impression from an Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2350 and c. 2150 BCE depicting the goddess Inanna with wings, bearing an assortment of weapons on her back, holding a flail in her left hand and a leash attached to a lion, on which she is resting her foot, in her right hand (left) and photograph of a clay tablet from the Schoyen Collection dating to between c. 1900 and c. 1700 BCE bearing the text of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld (right)
L. Frank Baum (and a short disclaimer about his truly deplorable racism)
The presence of nonbinary characters in ancient literature that minors would have read is one thing, but one of the earliest nonbinary child characters in a work of literature written specifically for children as the primary target audience actually appears in a children’s novel written by the celebrated American author L. Frank Baum (lived 1856 – 1919) over a hundred years ago.
Baum is best known for his children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (originally published in the year 1900 through the George M. Hill Company) and the thirteen other Oz novels he wrote as sequels to it (all of which he published through a different publishing company, Reilly & Britton, after George M. Hill went out of business). He also, however, wrote many other, less famous children’s novels in addition to his Oz series.
Before I dive into Baum’s work, for full disclosure, I feel it is important to note that—like, unfortunately, many or most white Anglo-American men of his time—he held some truly execrable racist views. In particular, in the early 1890s, he wrote two seething editorials in the newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, of which he was the editor, in which he enthusiastically cheers on the mass genocide of Indigenous peoples.
On 15 December 1890, the Indian Service police killed the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull. In response, Baum wrote and published an editorial in which he full-throatedly calls for the total extermination of all Native Americans from the face of the earth. On 3 January 1891, in response to the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which the United States Army massacred over three hundred Lakota people, Baum wrote and published a second, similar editorial, in which he declares that the army was not “decisive” enough and again affirms his belief that the U.S. must completely exterminate all Native Americans, sparing absolutely no one. Baum writes in this second editorial:
“The PIONEER has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the r*****ns as those have been in the past.”
Baum wrote both of these editorials around a decade before he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first book in the Oz series and the book that really made his brand as a children’s author. He did not publish any editorials openly supporting genocide during the period when he was actively publishing novels, but there is no evidence that he ever regretted or showed remorse over having written these op-eds. Even if he did, enthusiastically cheering on genocide while it is happening is not a transgression for which a person can easily seek forgiveness. Many of his novels also contain grotesquely racist stereotypes and racist attempts at humor.
ABOVE: Photograph of L. Frank Baum taken in around 1911 or thereabouts
The queer world of L. Frank Baum’s early twentieth-century children’s novels
In contrast to his abhorrent racial views, in some ways, Baum’s views on gender were surprisingly progressive for a white Anglo-American straight cisgender man of his time. He ardently supported the cause of women’s suffrage and was an outspoken supporter of the first-wave feminist movement more broadly. In 1882, he married Maud Gage, the daughter of none other than Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the foremost leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. at the time. Gage’s feminist activism strongly influenced Baum’s views and his work. The Baum family even hosted Susan B. Anthony as a guest at their home.
Baum seems to have really enjoyed exploring questions and ideas about gender through his writing. Unsurprisingly, given his support for women’s suffrage and his broadly first-wave feminist outlook, his stories frequently portray female characters who do tasks and occupations that were traditionally reserved for men and who hold positions of power and leadership.
Admittedly, his writing is still occasionally quite sexist. (His grossly stereotypical portrayal of Jinjur and her army of all-female soldiers, who want to seize the treasury of the Emerald City to buy themselves new dresses, who fight with knitting needles, and who are all terrified of mice, in his second Oz novel The Marvelous Land of Oz, published in July 1904, is particularly cringeworthy.) At times, though, he pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to portray in children’s literature at the time (and even to some extent today).
Baum’s publisher Reilly & Britton actually rejected his original submitted version of his 1916 novel Mary Louise, aimed at a target audience of adolescent girls—despite the fact that he was their star author—because they thought that the female protagonist was too independent and not idealized enough and that the novel therefore wouldn’t sell. Baum was greatly vexed over this decision, but he rewrote the novel to make the protagonist better suited to his publisher’s expectations. (Sadly, Baum’s original version of the novel has not survived, so it is impossible to compare his original draft to the published version and see how they truly differ.)
Baum’s fantasy stories frequently portray characters as changing both their gender and their physical sex through magic, blurring traditionally sharp distinctions between male and female. For instance, the main character in his novel The Enchanted Island of Yew, published in 1903 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, is a female fairy who is transformed into a human boy for one year, adopting the name Prince Marvel. The novel describes the various adventures that Prince Marvel goes on during his year as a boy before turning back into a fairy.
Similarly, in both Baum’s novel Queen Zixi of Ix (originally published in serial format from November 1904 to October 1905 in St. Nicholas Magazine) and his short story “The Witchcraft of Mary-Marie” (originally published in 1908 in the Bobbs-Merrill Company re-issued edition of American Fairy Tales), magic users of one sex take on the physical form of a different sex.
ABOVE: Front cover illustration by Fanny Y. Cory for L. Frank Baum’s 1903 novel The Enchanted Island of Yew, depicting the female fairy who is magically transformed into a male human, adopting the name Prince Marvel
As I plan to discuss in much greater detail in a future post, in The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum’s second Oz novel, the main character is first introduced as a boy who lives in Oz named Tip who cannot remember his parents and has been raised for as long as he can remember by a wicked witch named Mombi, who horribly abuses him. Tip ends up running away from Mombi and going on various adventures, meeting all sorts of colorful friends along the way.
Near the end of the novel, it is revealed in a surprising twist that Tip is actually none other than the princess Ozma, the daughter and sole surviving heir of the deceased King Pastoria of Oz, from whom the eponymous Wizard of the first novel unjustly usurped power, and the rightful queen of the land of Oz by birth. It is revealed that the Wizard gave her as an infant to Mombi, who wickedly transformed her into a boy in order to hide her so that no one would discover her true royal identity.
Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, tells Tip/Ozma that he must be restored to his true, female form and assume his rightful place as the queen of Oz. At first, Tip is hesitant because he fears that, if he becomes a girl, then his friends will treat him differently and he won’t be able to go on adventures anymore. All his friends, however, reassure him that they won’t view him any differently as a girl and that he can still go on adventures with them. With these assurances, Tip consents to be transformed back into her true form as Ozma.
Ozma remains the queen of Oz and appears in all of Baum’s subsequent Oz novels, including in many of them as one of the main protagonists.
ABOVE: Illustration by John R. Neill that appears on page 31 of the original 1904 edition of L. Frank Baum’s novel The Marvelous Land of Oz depicting Ozma as the young boy Tip (left) and illustration by Neill from one of the later Oz novels depicting her slightly older and in her true form as the queen of Oz (right)
Ozma’s romantic orientation is also worth mentioning here. She seems to briefly display a something of a crush on Jinjur (a woman) in her first appearance as Tip (The Marvelous Land of Oz, pages 83–85) and, even after becoming a girl, she never seems to show any romantic interest in boys at any point. On the contrary, over the course of Baum’s subsequent Oz novels, she and Dorothy Gale develop a heavily lesbian-coded relationship.
Dorothy and Ozma meet for the first time in Baum’s third Oz novel Ozma of Oz, published in July 1907. In the story, when Dorothy hears Ozma’s voice for the first time, the narrator says (on page 110) that “. . . as soon as she heard the sweet voice of the girlish Ruler of Oz [she] knew that she would soon learn to love her dearly.”
In Baum’s fifth Oz novel The Road to Oz, when Dorothy and Ozma see each other, the narrator describes (on pages 203–204, from a third-person limited perspective focused on Dorothy) how Ozma is extraordinarily, unimaginably beautiful and how anyone who sees her cannot help but fall in love with her.
As if to prove this, Dorothy immediately runs up to Ozma, throws her arms around her in a loving hug, and kisses her “rapturously.” The original 1906 edition of the book bears a half-page, black-and-white illustration by Baum’s illustrator John R. Neill on page 205 depicting the two girls passionately making out on the lips. The back cover of the book also bears another illustration of Dorothy and Ozma’s silhouettes kissing on the lips, with their names written underneath to indicate who they are. Throughout the ensuing novels, Baum routinely describes Dorothy and Ozma as kissing each other farewell basically anytime they part ways.
In the sixth book in the series The Emerald City of Oz, published in 1910, on page 52, Ozma grants Dorothy the official title of royal princess, describing her as her “chosen companion,” and the two girls make plans to move in together so that they can be together as much as possible; they end up living in the same palace in the Emerald City for the rest of the series. Baum’s eleventh Oz novel The Lost Princess of Oz, published in 1917, begins by emphasizing the unique closeness of Dorothy and Ozma’s relationship, repeatedly emphasizing that Dorothy is the only one who is allowed to enter Ozma’s private rooms at any time unannounced.
There is, of course, absolutely no indication in any of the books that there is any sexual aspect to Dorothy and Ozma’s relationship, but a relationship doesn’t have to be sexual to be queer. By the time the later books in the series take place, Dorothy and Ozma are seemingly either tweens or young teenagers, so they are frankly too young to be having any kind of sexual relations. Nonetheless, they do all the things that a pair of lesbian girlfriends could be expected to do at their age.
ABOVE: Illustration by John R. Neill that appears on page 205 of the original 1909 edition of L. Frank Baum’s novel The Road to Oz, showing Dorothy and Ozma kissing “rapturously” on the lips
Chick the Cherub
I think I have amply illustrated at this point that there is a lot of gender-bendy and queer stuff throughout Baum’s children’s novels. Of particular interest to the subject of this post, however, is Baum’s children’s fantasy novel John Dough and the Cherub, published in 1906 by the Reilly & Britton Company.
To be perfectly upfront, the novel is not one of Baum’s better works. The first of the two eponymous main characters to be introduced is a living gingerbread man named John Dough, who frankly doesn’t have much in the way of a personality apart from not wanting to be eaten. None of the main characters really have any strong goals or aspirations, the plot is mostly nonexistent, and the novel mostly consists of a series of disconnected mini-adventures in which the protagonists encounter various unusual characters and creatures before moving on.
The work also, unfortunately, contains significantly more overt casual racism than most of Baum’s other novels, including some grotesquely racist, highly stereotypical portrayals of Arabs and Native Americans. (One of the main villains of the story, who is introduced within the first chapter, before either of the eponymous main characters, is an evil, exoticized, turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding, “Arab” sorcerer with a faux-Arabic name, who is described using racist language.)
That being said, the work is surprisingly progressive in its portrayal of one particular character: the second of the two eponymous main characters, an angelic child named Chick the Cherub, who is of androgynous gender expression and wholly indeterminate sex.
ABOVE: Front cover of L. Frank Baum’s novel John Dough and the Cherub, published in 1906. Chick (i.e., the child shown on the right wearing the red pajamas) is portrayed as being of androgynous gender expression and wholly indeterminate sex.
Chick dresses in androgynous pajamas and sandals with an androgynous hairstyle. Throughout the entire novel, Baum never once uses a gendered pronoun to refer to them. Instead, he consistently refers to them using the neuter pronoun “it” to avoid calling them “he” or “she.” Baum describes Chick’s appearance as follows when he first introduces them (on pages 62–64):
“The child had fair hair, falling in fleecy waves to its shoulders, but more or less tangled and neglected. It had delicate features, rosy cheeks, and round blue eyes. When these eyes were grave which was seldom there were questions in them; when they smiled which was often sunbeams rippled over their blue surfaces. For clothing the child wore garments of pure white, which reached from the neck to the ankles, and had wide flowing sleeves and legs, like those of a youngster’s pajamas. The little one’s head and feet were bare, but the pink soles were protected by sandals fastened with straps across the toes and ankles.”
While a person being androgynous is, of course, not necessarily the same thing as them being nonbinary, Chick’s androgyny seems to be a deliberate and self-conscious part of their gender expression.
As the author J. L. Bell points out in this blog post, Chick’s personality is similarly as androgynous as their appearance in terms of the stereotypical understanding of gender that many people held at the time the novel was published; they are boisterous like a stereotypical boy, but also loving and tenderhearted like a stereotypical girl.
ABOVE: Illustration by John R. Neill that appears on page 64 of the original 1906 edition of L. Frank Baum’s novel John Dough and the Cherub, showing how Neill imagined Chick based on Baum’s description
Incubator babies
Surprisingly, Baum doesn’t really make a big deal of Chick’s gender-neutrality. In fact, he doesn’t even mention the matter of Chick’s gender until the very last sentence of the very last page of the entire novel and, even then, he only does so to set up the contest his publishers created for marketing purposes (which I will discuss further in a moment). Instead, Baum makes a big deal of the fact that Chick is (as he describes them on page 66) “the first and only Original Incubator Baby” (i.e., the first baby born premature to be saved by being placed in a baby incubator).
At the time when John Dough and the Cherub was published in 1906, incubators meant to keep preemie babies alive had only recently been invented in the 1880s and were widely seen as an amazing, futuristic technology. Despite this, incubators were not widely used in hospitals, in part because, as this article by Rebecca Rego Barry published in JSTOR Daily discusses, with the influence of the eugenics movement, many doctors believed that preemie babies were simply too inherently weak to survive and that they either couldn’t be saved or were not worth the expense of saving. Some doctors actually outright denounced all efforts to save preemie babies, claiming that, if saved, they would pollute the gene pool with their defective heredity.
In an effort to change public opinion and convince people that preemie babies both could be saved and were worth saving, a showman named Martin Couney displayed preemie babies in incubators as a sideshow attraction known as the “Infantorium” at the Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin in 1896, at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Celebration in London in 1897, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904.
Hundreds of thousands of people visited his attractions and marveled at the possibility that infants born premature could be saved through the wonders of modern technology. Some of the infants he displayed were so tiny that some visitors to the exhibit expressed incredulity that they were even really alive. Despite this, around 85% of the infants he cared for survived—a rate vastly higher than the survival rate for preemie babies virtually anywhere else. Over the course of his lifetime, his exhibit is estimated to have saved thousands of preemie babies who otherwise would have died.
ABOVE: Photograph showing Martin Couney’s exhibit of preemie babies in incubators at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901
In John Dough and the Cherub, when John Dough remarks that he has never heard of an incubator baby before, the Fresh-Air Fiend (the character who introduces Chick) directly references Couney’s “Infantorium” exhibits at the Pan-American and Louisiana Purchase Expositions. The ensuing conversation reads as follows (on pages 65–66):
“‘No, they’re a recent invention,’ declared the big-headed man, patting tenderly the child’s golden curls. ‘Were you, by any chance, at the Pan-American Exposition? Or the Lousiana Purchase Exposition?’”
“‘No,’ answered John. My knowledge was corked up about then.’”
“‘Well,’ continued the man, ‘there were a good many Incubator Babies at both those expositions, and lots of people saw them. But Chick is the first and only Original Incubator Baby, and so Chick properly belongs in the Isle of Phreex.’”
The novel seems to imply that Chick’s gender-neutrality may be simply the natural result of them having been born premature and kept alive in an incubator.
“The Great John Dough Mystery”
Baum’s publisher Reilly & Britton initially insisted that he needed to eventually reveal that Chick is either a boy or a girl, but Baum absolutely refused to do so. Eventually, finding that Baum wasn’t willing to bend, the company decided to capitalize on his decision as best as they could by holding a contest for readers to try to guess Chick’s gender (which they assumed to be binary) and explain their guess in twenty-five words or less.
Frank Joslyn Baum (L. Frank Baum’s son) claims in his 1962 biography of his father To Please a Child that Baum ended up awarding two prizes for the contest: one to a girl who argued that Chick was a girl and one to a boy who argued that they were a boy. It is not clear whether this story is true, however, since Frank Joslyn Baum is known to have fabricated and embellished many of the stories he tells in the biography.
ABOVE: Promotional image for L. Frank Baum’s novel John Dough and the Cherub advertising the manufactured controversy over Chick’s gender identity
Why did Baum make Chick this way?
A few reasons stand out as to why Baum may have chosen to portray Chick as effectively what twenty-first-century readers would describe as nonbinary. The first reason is because, as I’ve already established, he seems to have enjoyed playing around with gender in his stories for fun. Having a self-consciously androgynous main character of completely unknown sex is exactly the sort of zany thing that Baum found amusing.
The second reason is because, from a marketing perspective, having an androgynous, gender-neutral child protagonist in a children’s novel is actually kind of a brilliant strategy for making the novel relatable to readers of all genders. If Chick were a boy, then girls might automatically find the character unrelatable, but, if Chick were a girl, then boys might automatically find the character unrelatable. With Chick being nonbinary and androgynous, all readers can find something in the character to relate to.
The third reason why Baum may have chosen to portray Chick as essentially nonbinary is political. As I mentioned before, Baum emphasizes the fact that Chick is an incubator baby, thereby portraying Chick as the product of what was seen at the time as a kind of futuristic technology.
As I also mentioned before, Baum was a supporter of women’s suffrage and he believed that women could do many or most traditionally masculine jobs just as well as men. His portrayal of Chick as nonbinary may therefore be intended to hint that, as technology and society progress, society will move beyond traditional gender norms and a person’s assigned sex at birth will become seen as increasingly less important.
Since I have never read any of these books, and did not know about Baum’s works other than Wizard of Oz, this was interesting to learn about.
A similar example I know of is The Muddler from the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. The character is introduced in “Moominpappa’s Memoirs” as Moominpappa’s childhood friend and Sniff’s long-lost father. Sniff uses he/him for The Muddler, but Moominpappa and the other characters from his youth uses the pronoun “it” and consistenly describes the character in gender-neutral language (not sure how this was handled in the English translation). Jansson was bisexual but I was still pretty surprised to notice this in a book from the ’50s.
And more recently from my own childhood we can just look at the Pokémon franchise: all the Pokémon have a ‘gender’ that is male, female or unknown, and many beloved characters like Mewtwo are “unknown”
Also, the Pokémon Azurill originally had a chance of changing gender upon evolving, which may or may not have been intentional. Too bad they changed it.
Thank you so much for telling me about this! I was not aware of this character, probably because I have never read any works by Tove Jansson as far as I can remember. I don’t think her work is very well known here in the U.S., although it is possible that I simply never encountered it when I was growing up.
As Jaojao and others may recall, Jannson created Moomintroll male and Snork Maiden female. The latter stayed with the Moomins in an asexual innocence that would disturb many parents today. Boys aren’t invited to girl’s sleepovers and vice versa, yet that’s the opposite of what Jannson wrote. Moomintroll and Snork Maiden are portrayed as old enough to have their own adventures, equivalent to preteens/tweens. There are some today who would find situations they’re in sexually inappropriate instead of open-minded. I believe an unbending cisgendered stance promotes misogeny, sexual abuse, and discrimination extending to all LGBTQIA+ as well as women. Raising children on gender neutral characters may reduce such prejudice.
I left Quora for the same reason that you did. The site’s moderation is very inconsistent. Also, are you looking to get a Ph.D.?
Yes, I am hoping to go on to earn a PhD in ancient history and become a professor of the subject.
I don’t fully get the whole non-binary thing, but they’re not hurting anyone so it’s whatever.
I really enjoy your articles, straight to the point, and you even add your opinions in there. Do you have a youtube page by any chance? or podcast?
Unfortunately, no, I do not have a YouTube page or a podcast. I have often thought about starting a YouTube channel in the past, but I have never done it, in part because writing, recording, and editing a video is much more work than merely writing a simple blog post and I also know nothing about video or sound editing and have no experience in those areas.
I used to write quite prolifically on Quora, but I have stopped writing new answers on that platform, mainly due to frustration with their unbelievably arbitrary and inconsistent moderation. This blog and the subreddit r/AskHistorians are currently the only platforms where I am actively posting new content. Unfortunately, I have far less time to devote to writing on this blog nowadays than I used to, since I am now in grad school. I used to make a new post on this blog at least once every week, but now it seems I am only making a new post roughly every two weeks to two-and-a-half weeks.
– I have often thought about starting a YouTube channel in the past, but I have never done it, in part because writing, recording, and editing a video is much more work than merely writing a simple blog post and I also know nothing about video or sound editing and have no experience in those areas. –
Writing, recording, editing, etc. is really time consuming, this is the reason why the biggest science (or history, philosophy, etc.) communication channels all have a team of at least 2-3 people to support the host.
But you know what you could do to avoid editing? Livestreams.
You could choose a topic related to ancient history you already wrote articles about, so you don’t need to stress looking for the references, and react live to bad takes about it on the internet, whichever “bad take”, either YouTube videos, blogposts, articles, tweets, etc.
This way you could reach a lot more people, because the reaction format tends to be very popular
It is also worth noting that, despite not having made YouTube videos of her own, Spencer has been featured in three videos (which I myself should really get around to watching) on Nick Barksdale (RIP)’s channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/07/03/youtube-videos-for-the-study-of-antiquity-and-the-middle-ages-3-july-2021/ https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/08/19/new-youtube-video-for-the-study-of-antiquity-and-the-middle-ages-19-august-2021/
What a nice article! I especially appreciated it as someone who, when was a kid, was a big fan of the ‘Oz series’ (limited to what I could find in Italian, alas), and I did read *The Marvelous Land of Oz* before knowing anything about LGBT+ people, and thought nothing of it. As you said, if an author were to publish that book now, he would be widely reviled for his ‘progressive politics being pushed down our throats’. And it’s indeed true that Baum’s books (racism aside) were very progressive, especially when it comes to their gender. Even the suffragette parody in *The Marvelous Land of Oz* can be partially explained. Firstly, I think General Jinjur was based on a suffragette friend of Baum, so her personality was kind of an in-joke of his, and it also parodies how men saw the movement at the time. The whole subplot is also very ironic, since most lands of Oz are governed by women, and there actually seems to be gender equality overall. I won’t deny it is still a pretty sexist subplot, but at least a little explainable.
Since we’re talking about Oz and gender, I would heartily recommend *The Wicked Years*, by Gregory Maguire. It’s a more adult retelling of the Oz books, and one of my favorite series ever. It is also interesting that the author is queer, and thus there is a lot of queer content in it, but I also love it as a historian. Oz in these books is very similar to the late-19th century America, and the author has been very meticulous in having every little element of the cultures depicted in the books reference something of our own past. It is one of the very few fantasy worlds in which the culture depicted actually resembles something realistic, and that is the main draw of the books. I especially loved how the author imagined religion to work in a world with magic and talking Animals.
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the post. I went through a period where I was massively obsessed with L. Frank Baum’s works back when I was in mid-to-late elementary school. I read all fourteen Oz novels written by Baum back in summer 2010, the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years.
I agree that the subplot about Jinjur’s revolt is intentionally ironic and that Baum probably intended it as a light-hearted, sympathetic parody of the women’s suffrage movement as men at the time generally perceived it. At the same time, though, it’s very cringey that he chose to do so by directly invoking so many gross, clichéd, sexist tropes.
Thank you for the recommendation of Gregory Maguire’s work. I had previously heard of his work and I know that it is the basis for the Broadway musical Wicked, but, as of the time I am writing this comment, I have never read any of it (or seen the musical Wicked, for that matter).
Oh, wow! I am seriously envious that you were able to read all fourteen original Oz novels! Back when I was a kid, I only was able to find the first two, and I read snippets of the others by reading Google Translated versions into Italian…
I feel like Jinjur’s subplot was kinda like if I wrote a story about evil ‘feminazis’ who worship Anita Sarkeesian, spend all their time complaining about manspreading and whose secret plot is to make every man gay by emasculating them with a secret serum, and to raise a generation of indoctrinated child slaves. Now, that would be quite funny with the right audience, but I definitely wouldn’t put it into my children’s book.
Maguire’s novels are very interesting. If you are there to have a grand story with epic-scale battles, then you will be disappointed, since most stuff goes in a very realistic fashion, and thus is often anti-climactic. Characters die for random reasons, and wars end in very unsatisfying ways. Not all answers of the plot are given, either. However, I feel like the setting and the culture(s) that underlie the story are the strong suit of this series. The whole setting is basically a giant ‘What if 19th-century America had magic, but the sort of magic that appears in children’s book? and yet the people in this world would behave like in adult books and real life?’. It ends up being a very intriguing read indeed.
And yes, as ‘James’ pointed out, the series is full of disturbing scenes of violent and/or sexual nature.
It’s worth pointing out that there are some very disturbing scenes in Wicked, that were removed for the musical.
Another non-gendered character kids knew, from a 100+ years ago, is Krazy Kat, famously part of a love triangle with 2 identifiably male characters, Officer Pupp & Ignatz Mouse still his creator, George Herriman said Krazy was…”something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So that Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a spirit—a pixie—free to butt into anything.” (quote found in wikipedia) the strip ran for more than 30 years.
It has been suggested that the cryptive nature of the strip came from the liminal existence Herriman himself lived.
Yeah, I was going to suggest that, but I got cold feet because I don’t think that comic strip was aimed at children.
I thought about that too but as a matter of fact my mom and her sister called each other “Ig” after Ignatz, from their childhood. btw I loved the recent biography KRAZY
George Herriman,
A Life In Black and White by Michael Tisserand
I love the fact that you combine your passion for history with attempts to educate people on trans matters. As a trans person who finds it difficult to fit into predominantly male history communities on the internet, I am glad that one of my favourite article-writers on history is herself trans.
I also find your professionalism quite refreshing. So far, I have not been able to find any content producers whose content matches the quality of your content. Keep it up!
Thank you so much! Your words here mean a lot to me. As you probably already know or have guessed, I care immensely about the quality and professionalism of my writing and I am always glad to hear that a fellow trans history buff appreciates the work I am doing.
I knew about Tip/Ozma, but I didn’t know that Baum had pursued this theme several times.
Other characters in a similar vein: Tove Jansson’s transvestite Hemulens in the Moomin books,
and Enid Blyton’s George in the Famous Five books (a girl who insists on being called by a boy’s name).
Thanks for another interesting article!
You’re welcome! I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the post! Baum seems to have been especially interested in the theme of characters changing sex through magic in the stories he wrote in around the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century c. 1903 – c. 1908.
I wasn’t aware of the examples from Jansson and Blyton, probably because I have never read any of the works by either of those authors as far as I can remember. Thank you for telling me about them!
Hindu mythology for example has many examples of deities changing gender, manifesting as different genders at different times, or combining to form androgynous or hermaphroditic beings.
Although traditional hindu literature source do not speak of this directly, it exist in narratives such as the Vedas, Mahabharata, Ramayana and Puranas as well as in regional folklore.
Hello, Spencer. I enjoy your Quora answers about Greek history and this blog a lot. Besides being a historian you know how to convey to your reader the information in a direct and clear way. I was wondering if you could write an article about a specific topic of Greek history that I’m interested in. After reading your article about the relation of Ancient with modern Greeks and how those ancestry DNA tests are at best misinterpreted was curious if you’d be interested in writing about Pontic Greeks and the presence of ancient Greeks in the Black Sea region in general but in the northern modern Turkey specifically. I could make a symbolic pledge of money to your blog as to say thank you. I have studied the history of Pontic Greeks on my own for a long period and the things I read online from people who don’t understand how DNA tests work and sorry to say, the things that people who don’t know basic history write I’m amazed. I had a blog about history in the past but it was in Greek. My English isn’t on the same level as of a native speaker so I thought you might find the topic interesting and that for sure you’d write an article that will explain things in a much scientific and coherent way than me. Thanks.
A fine article!
Thank you Spencer.
I remember reading once on Quora that the Hebrew God is also supposed to be a non-gendered being. I believe it was Claire Jordan who wrote about the original Hebrew referring to the Womb of God in some places but presenting God as a Father in other places.
Also, non-binary or agender characters appear in such games as Serious Sam, where the chief villain of the story is a genderless alien named Mental.
I have only recently discovered your blog. I have no comment on this particular article. Working my way through your previous articles, I occasionally want to comment (usually just with praise and appreciation), but comments are closed in most of those older articles. So I am commenting here about your blog and your writing in general: It is, and you are, truly superb. I love it and thank you for it.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate your positive feedback and I am very glad to hear that you are enjoying my articles! I’m also sorry that I’m not making new posts as regularly nowadays as I used to. I’m in grad school now, I’m taking four graduate-level courses, and I’m also working as a course assistant for an additional course. As a result, my time is more limited than it used to be. I should, however, be coming out with a new article sometime in the next few days about the history of cursive writing.