66 pages • 2 hours read
Alex GinoGeorge
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Secrecy and Shame
While the reader meets George hiding her true identity from the world, this has not always been the case. As George is coming out as transgender, she and Mom remember a time when Mom “found” George wearing her “skirt as a dress” (170) and how she threw “a temper tantrum” when Mom would not buy her a tutu (171). As a child, George was drawn to what felt natural to her and experienced all the cruelty of not being allowed to do as she wished because of her assigned gender. However, at some unspecified point between that time and the novel’s narrative, George learns that she must hide her girlish inclinations along with her belief that she is a girl.
Still, George cannot help herself from putting together a collection of girls’ magazines from trash cans and recycling bins, which she hides in a denim bag. She even uses soft toys to “guard” the collection, deciding the bag does not provide enough of a disguise (2). The opening chapter is devoted to George’s elaborate ritual of ensuring that no one else is in the house. She peruses the magazines until the “clatter” outside warns her that someone is about to approach and potentially discover her secret (5). When her brother, Scott, enters the house and demands to use the bathroom, where George is with her magazines, George quickly stashes the bag on the showerhead, feeling fear and panic. She worries that “the bag was probably still swinging in the shower” and that it could “hit against the curtain or, worse, fall and land in the bathtub with a thud” (7). Gino creates tension in the narrative here, showing that if the ordinary law of gravity is effective, George’s secret will likely be found out.
When Scott asks why George was taking so long in the bathroom and she hesitates, Scott speculates that she was “looking at dirty magazines” (8). George almost laughs, because she was looking at magazines where “the girls wore a lot more clothes,” even though by the norms of a gendered, largely heterosexual world, that is ironically a dirtier secret than the one Scott has fabricated (8).
After Scott and the humor he provides vanishes, Gino shows us that George’s experience of secrecy is both lonely and degrading. In a still frightened state, she “rescued her bag” and stashes it away, before collapsing on her bed and “wishing she were someone else—anyone else” (9). This desire to become another person expresses George’s deep discomfort and self-loathing. She cannot help being herself and yet the world is telling her that this self is wrong and that she must hide it. Gino thus shows that secrecy is untenable.
Natural Versus Normal
Gino shows the natural and the normal to be distinct. Using a third person closed narrative voice, which closely mirrors George’s thoughts, Gino shows the natural to be what George herself feels to be true. For example, George is never in any doubt that she is a girl and that she should have long hair and experiment with wearing makeup. Charlotte, the character who she most admires in the class play, is the best fitting part for George: “it seemed natural to say Charlotte’s words” (35). In contrast, “Wilbur, the dirty pig,” the masculine role Ms. Udell wants to assign George, is an unnatural imposition (85). Other unnatural impositions from George’s perspective are the boys’ bathrooms, where she is sent when she is upset, and that unwanted “thing” between her legs that she “tried not to think about” (44). Her incumbent manhood is especially terrifying to George because it will take her further away from her true self.
George’s view of the natural comes into conflict with the normal, as it is defined by society’s expectations of how a person of George’s assigned gender should look and behave. Jeff’s taunts of “girl” and “freak” (12) convey that George is subverting gender expectations when she shows how deeply she cares about Charlotte (118). While Jeff gives George a thorough beating for not conforming to his own ideas of masculinity, this is arguably less painful for her than having her wish to be a girl, both on stage and real life, treated as a joke by well-meaning people such as Ms. Udell and her mother. For example, when she hears that George thinks she is a girl, “Mom’s face relaxed and she gave a short laugh” as she draws comfort from the fact of George’s masculine anatomy (129). It is only when Mom is finally able to accept her child’s truth, rather than falling back on what she believes to be true, that any progress can be made with their relationship.
Gino shows that conventional expectations of what is normal are deeply unfair to transgender people. However, by leaving George’s intentions towards surgery and her sexuality ambiguous, the author refuses to posit a new normal or natural for transgender people. George is curious about hormonal treatments and the adaptive surgery that will stop her from turning into a man but does not explicitly sign up for it. George thinks admiringly of Tina, a transgender woman in a television interview, who fends off questions about whether she has had surgery by replying that “she was a transgender woman and that what she had between her legs was nobody’s business but hers and her boyfriend’s” (46). Rather than describing what George plans to do anatomically, the novel ends with George being her true self: Melissa. The authentic self, rather than the details of what Melissa has between her legs, is the lasting impression that Gino seeks to leave with the reader.
Coming Out in an Ambivalent World
One of the key themes in Gino’s book is the ambivalent attitude of the world to which George has to come out and introduce her real self. In Mom’s conversation with George, she refers to a time in the past when she was young and it was more difficult to be non-heterosexual: “Being gay is one thing,” she says, “kids are coming out much earlier than when I was young” (128). Therefore, George’s world is one in which homosexuality is becoming more familiar and accepted. This is evidenced in Mom and Scott’s initial assumption that George reads girls’ magazines because she is a gay boy. While Mom assumes that being gay would present difficulties, Scott, who is from a different generation and has a gay friend, Matt, describes being gay as “no big deal” (139).
However, George who “didn’t know who she liked, really, boys or girls” is confused by the assumptions that she is gay and also by her mom’s bewilderment around her being “something else entirely” (128). The latter expression, which fails to define what George is, implies Mom’s failure and even her unwillingness to understand her child’s difference. The confusion also feeds into George’s school, which is segregated into male and female bathrooms, and male and female roles in the play. Were George a gay boy, she would not disrupt these categories; however, being a transgender girl with the appearance of a boy, she is made miserable by structures which forbid her from doing what is most natural to her. George finds relief and safety in the word “transgender,” which is finally a category that applies to her, and she longs for a group of “other girls like her” (125). Gino presents a world in which George’s community is arriving at creating “a safe space” for transgender kids (125). Each of them—transgender kids like George, friends like Kelly, and staff like Principal Maldonado—all have a role to play in creating the new, more tolerant system.
