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The Library of Congress summary, provided by the publisher, reads: "Grayson, a transgender twelve-year-old, learns to accept her true identity and share it with the world; middle grade fiction".
Gracefully Grayson's title character is a male-bodied person who uses male pronouns throughout (as does the author, unlike the publisher who wrote the summary, and so I will do likewise); but Grayson secretly understands himself to be a girl.
When literature is written for a middle grade audience, there are both constraints and freedoms available that are not present when writing for an adult audience: Grayson twirls in an oversized shirt and imagines it to be a skirt, and this motif, repeated throughout, acts as a stand-in for all of the complexity behind "What does it MEAN to be a girl instead of a boy if you're male?"
That's somewhat necessary, since a book aimed at 10 year olds could be a tough sell on the market if it were to delve excessively or explicitly into questions of genitalia, gendered aspects of sexuality, or musings about sociology and biology and their respective input into behavior and its interpretations.
But it's also freeing. I can state from experience that saying (as an adult) "I'm different, I'm actually a woman inside" means having to face a gauntlet of questions — "Do you dislike your male body?"; "If you just prefer a skirt and like to wear your hair long, how does that make you a woman, Scottish men wear kilts and men at several times throughout history had their hair long?"; "Are you claiming that your brain developed in a female pattern in utero?"; "Will you be getting surgery and, if so, which ones, and how about hormones?"; "How do you know you're 'like a woman', as you say, since you've never been one?" — Grayson's story operates on a simpler and more elegant level; for Grayson and for his classmates and family, his being a girl instead of a boy is forbidden, and hidden in secrecy, and then at a certain point not hidden and on display for people to accept or be shocked at and outraged about, but it isn't deconstructed and thrown back in his face with a demand for more explanation.
And because none is demanded, none is given. Is Grayson going to be sexually attracted to males? Certainly some of the other kids think this must be the case, and, from their behavior, so do some of the adults; but if Grayson himself has sexual feelings and inclinations of any form, we aren't brought in on them, and sexual feelings and orientation don't appear to play a part in Grayson's own consideration of his gender. Will Grayson seek a physical transition? The question is never posed to him and in his imagination he doesn't visualize himself with (or, for that matter, without) female bodyparts, just with girlish adornments and garments. At the end of the book, we don't know. We're left with the strong sense that Grayson will seek to be perceived as a girl and accepted as a girl, including (as strongly hinted in a late scene) going into the girls', not the boys' bathroom. But that's as much as he knows and that's as much as we know after reading the final pages.
Interestingly, this makes it one of the few coming-out narratives I could identify with from start to finish. (Although Grayson is described by the publisher as a "transgender" character, I was able to read it as a story about another genderqueer individual like me, a gender invert who is, and would remain, a male-bodied girl).
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Gracefully Grayson's title character is a male-bodied person who uses male pronouns throughout (as does the author, unlike the publisher who wrote the summary, and so I will do likewise); but Grayson secretly understands himself to be a girl.
When literature is written for a middle grade audience, there are both constraints and freedoms available that are not present when writing for an adult audience: Grayson twirls in an oversized shirt and imagines it to be a skirt, and this motif, repeated throughout, acts as a stand-in for all of the complexity behind "What does it MEAN to be a girl instead of a boy if you're male?"
That's somewhat necessary, since a book aimed at 10 year olds could be a tough sell on the market if it were to delve excessively or explicitly into questions of genitalia, gendered aspects of sexuality, or musings about sociology and biology and their respective input into behavior and its interpretations.
But it's also freeing. I can state from experience that saying (as an adult) "I'm different, I'm actually a woman inside" means having to face a gauntlet of questions — "Do you dislike your male body?"; "If you just prefer a skirt and like to wear your hair long, how does that make you a woman, Scottish men wear kilts and men at several times throughout history had their hair long?"; "Are you claiming that your brain developed in a female pattern in utero?"; "Will you be getting surgery and, if so, which ones, and how about hormones?"; "How do you know you're 'like a woman', as you say, since you've never been one?" — Grayson's story operates on a simpler and more elegant level; for Grayson and for his classmates and family, his being a girl instead of a boy is forbidden, and hidden in secrecy, and then at a certain point not hidden and on display for people to accept or be shocked at and outraged about, but it isn't deconstructed and thrown back in his face with a demand for more explanation.
And because none is demanded, none is given. Is Grayson going to be sexually attracted to males? Certainly some of the other kids think this must be the case, and, from their behavior, so do some of the adults; but if Grayson himself has sexual feelings and inclinations of any form, we aren't brought in on them, and sexual feelings and orientation don't appear to play a part in Grayson's own consideration of his gender. Will Grayson seek a physical transition? The question is never posed to him and in his imagination he doesn't visualize himself with (or, for that matter, without) female bodyparts, just with girlish adornments and garments. At the end of the book, we don't know. We're left with the strong sense that Grayson will seek to be perceived as a girl and accepted as a girl, including (as strongly hinted in a late scene) going into the girls', not the boys' bathroom. But that's as much as he knows and that's as much as we know after reading the final pages.
Interestingly, this makes it one of the few coming-out narratives I could identify with from start to finish. (Although Grayson is described by the publisher as a "transgender" character, I was able to read it as a story about another genderqueer individual like me, a gender invert who is, and would remain, a male-bodied girl).
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