After Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe's Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding

Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Binding, Breathe, Dr Sarah Peitzmeier., gender queer, graphic novel, Maia Kobabe

Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding is a comic book guide to gender-affirming care from Gender Queer’s Maia Kobabe and Dr Sarah Peitzmeier.

Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding is a comic book guide to gender-affirming care with real-life stories and research-backed advice about chest binding, from Gender Queer author Maia Kobabe and University of Michigan professor Doctor Sarah Peitzmeier, Intended to be a practical resource for trans and nonbinary people, it wil be based on Professor Peitzmeier’s academic research, the comic book will be co-written and drawn by America’s most banned author and illustrator who has talked eir the whole experience here.

“A graphic guide to gender affirming care with real-life stories and research-backed advice about chest binding from bestselling Gender Queer author Maia Kobabe and University of Michigan professor Sarah Peitzmeier. Breathe arose from the need for an evidence-based resource for folks considering chest binding as gender-affirming care. Its original form was a 32-page digital-only ‘zine, but Peitzmeier and Kobabe saw potential for reaching a wider audience with an expanded version with more art and more exploration of what the research really shows about binding, designed to be easily readable as a printed book. This is the result. To create Breathe, Peitzmeier and her research team interviewed 25 people of different ages and backgrounds about their journeys with binding, and then she and Kobabe combined excerpts from those interviews with evidence-based resources on binding into this extremely accessible book. The result is both a practical resource for trans and nonbinary folks and an engaging and perspective-broadening read for anyone interested in what it means to be on a journey of expressing one’s gender in the ways that are the most joyful, healthy, and affirming for them.”

Andrew Karre at Dutton has acquired world English rights to Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding for the spring of 2024 and Maia Kobabe’s agent Emily Mitchell at Wernick & Pratt negotiated the deal.

Dr Sarah Peitzmeier is a mixed-methods social epidemiologist focusing on gender-based violence and sexual health, She is committed to community-engaged research that addresses under-researched community priorities, including her work on chest binding and health in transmasculine individuals. Transgender men and non-binary people may bind their chests with contstrictive clothing to minimize gender dysphoria.

Maia’s next comic book to follow this is Saachi’s Stories, a graphic novel for kids co-created with Lucky Srikumar, scheduled from Scholastic Graphix for the spring of 2025. And this “coming-of-age middle-grade graphic novel follows aspiring author Saachi, who struggles to navigate changing social dynamics and her evolving identity, as her friends start coupling up and everybody else seems to fit neatly into a boy/girl binary.” Intended for a younger audience than Gender Queer, and fictional rather than biographical, it will be also about a character “wrestling with gender, identity, and sexuality, this time in the crucible of junior high.”

Dutton began publishing religious books in the nineteenth century, its first bestseller was the two-volume The Life of Christ by Frederic W. Farrar, published in 1874. Dutton joined the Penguin Publishing Group in 1986, and in 2015 became an imprint of the newly merged Penguin Random House.

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