I was reminded again this afternoon that as far as I can tell, I encountered my first non-binary character in Jean M. Auel's The Valley of Horses (1982), which I read for the first time, partly under my desk in social studies class, in seventh grade.
( A spiritual being that rides any weather. )
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
( A spiritual being that rides any weather. )
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
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