Us

Oops back in June I selected the single issue rather than the book.
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There were lots of things that I liked about this, but also some things that I felt really snagged and weakened it.

This book is tagged as a graphic memoir and I don't know if that fits. It's the couple's coming out story, Sara comes out as (whispers) demisexual & (shouts) bisexual and Diana comes out as a transwoman. We learn somethings about their childhoods and families, but only as it pertains to their gender and Sara's sexuality (Diana's sexuality is never discussed).

I appreciate the use of a scapegoat, I thought that was clever and, in a way, kind. I liked Sara's transparency of saying that somethings were going to be exaggerated. However, I hated the scene where Diana gets an ear piercing and the person doing the piercing slaps Diana because she faints(?) and then Sara says “That's how we discovered she doesn't do well with needles.” Uhhh you've been drawing Diana with a tattoo the entire time so were those needles not problematic? I assume that the slap might have been an exaggeration, but I don't think it's funny, it's cringe.
I don't know if it was exaggerated or not but I found Diana's lack of knowledge about women's experiences to be sadly ignorant, it reached a level to where it broke suspension of disbelief for me because Diana has been dating Sara for years and it makes me wonder ‘Does Diana not have any sisters or close female friends?' Diana knows nothing of feminine clothing (lack of pockets, odd sizing.), make up (she touches her face after make up is applied and is surprised that it smeared), street harassment, how women are treated on the internet, or that men will mansplain. I've had cismen complain to me about a fellow engineer mainsplaining to them, so even those presenting as male experience it. Gamers know how women are treated on the internet.

I really dislike the way Sara draws her eyes.

I wonder if Sara would have gotten less backlash had she instead gone with the term pansexual rather than bisexual, it's doubtful but it's something I wonder. I almost dated a man in college who wanted to use the term pansexual but his friends(?) made a lot of jokes about being attracted to pans so he usually defaulted to labeling himself as bi. I also wonder if Sara would have experienced less biphobia, ignorance, or stigma had she also come out as demisexual to her community, or including it as part of her sexuality. Maybe she did but what she showed was only conversations with others discussing her being bi, not anything else.

One of the roommate acts like Diana coming out as trans is not special (he says ‘is that it? is that what all the drama was for? You didn't have to call a meeting') and Sara and Diana are unhappy and annoyed, turning the roommate into an awful egotistical, virtual signaling asshole. But when Sara's dad says ‘Who cares what she is? We're all born from the same hole.' Sara and her parents laugh at the dad's casual acceptance. Yes, I agree that the roommate is problematic, but how is the dad's reaction not either?

Points for telling the young niece and the grandparents. Yay for reiterating that there are numerous ways to be trans and to come out.

I'm trying to figure it out but it really made me cringe when Sara says “If there's anything that I've learned over the years, it's that trans people are the toughest folks on the planet”. I think I dislike this because it makes me think of the brand of ableism that disabled people are ‘inspiration porn'. I believe that it is difficult to be trans, the patriarchy does not make things easy, and the book discusses Diana experiencing dysphoria, taking hormones, and navigating government bureaucracy to change her ID card. However Sara's comment about trans folks being the toughest comes right after Diana dealing with being ‘a girl on the internet' so it doesn't have the same impact had it come after the other things I listed.

Things that were left out that I think were kind of detractors:
did not discuss Diana's sexuality, being trans is a gender identity not a sexual orientation
why she chose the name Diana
if the couple was interested in getting married

They can set the scope of what they want to share but for the trans people I have known choosing/changing their name was an important part of their identity and had meaning behind it. I knew someone who went by Storm, they felt that their name explained who they were, another chose Khrysalis (with a nick name of Khrys) because she felt that she had under gone a metamorphosis, and another chose Coralie because it was cute and feminine. Not that they have to definitively decide about marriage but it would have been an opportunity to provide information about their identity and human rights. By the way Spain legalized same sex marriage in 2005, this book did not tell me that, but it prompted me to look it up.

As a structural note, I did not know that this took place in Spain until through most of the book. Early on it talks about how Spanish has gendered adjectives (doesn't it also have gendered nouns?!) so I knew that it was a Spanish-speaking country but that's a lot of countries and LBGT+ rights (and therefore experiences) vary a lot by country. And it also confused me because I thought that most of Europe's sizes (clothing and shoes) were stated in centimeters, guess not.