sparklemaia

[sparklemaia]

my favorite gays-on-a-spaceship audiodrama podcast is back for the third and final season and I accidentally... made more fan art... this time based on an off-hand comment someone in the fan-run discord said 🫣 thanks @iriscasefiles for letting my brain fixate on a fictional fascist regime instead of the real one I'm floundering under you're the best 😘😘

[sparklemaia]

[sparklemaia]

hourly comics 2025

[sparklemaia]

it's been quiet 'round here for all the usual reasons ((side-eyes societal collapse)) but also because I'm making a graphic novel and attending school full-time and making enough soup every Monday to feed 20 hungry art school students and also doing a lot of this🧶

[sparklemaia]

I'm working on a graphic novel and it's hard!!! But now I have Maia Kobabe (redgoldsparks) mentoring me (which is so? cool???) ahhhh

it's maia x maia! maia²!

with our powers combined, etc.

[sparklemaia]

Heyyy!!

So I've recently read a lot of your comics about top surgery, and I really resonate with your experience (I haven't had it myself but I'd like to). I've recently been exploring my own gender and realising I might be non binary, but I guess I feel sort of an imposter in that I want to keep my name and pronouns (afab), despite feeling like I never got the memo about what a "woman" is, which I know is fine, but I guess I was wondering how the shift from your agab into realising you were nb felt?

Like, you seem to describe your gender as sort of unknowable and indefinable, and I guess that's sort of how I feel? I just want to be... More me. I guess what I'm really asking is, how would you define/feel about that shift into realising you were nonbinary, do you still feel connected to your agab, how do you reconcile the two?

Sorry for the long ask!

Hi, this is such a good question! I actually DO still feel pretty connected to my agab. I feel like I am a girl but also more than a girl but also not enough of a girl, simultaneously. (Weirdly, I never ever feel like a woman, and definitely not a man, but I do feel like an adult at least some of the time.) Top surgery was 100% the right decision for me; my body feels so much more correct and I am grateful every single day this procedure was accessible to me. (I was on a low dose of T for a year and a half too, and I basically just got biceps and a sliiiightly lower voice out of it. We stan.) I simply don't have strong feelings about how these things do or do not map onto gender identity or other people's perceptions of my gender. I am generally perceived as female, and that's fine! Like, close enough! I often feel somewhere BETWEEN cis and trans, or even between cis and nonbinary, and sometimes I joke that I'm just "nonbinary for insurance purposes." I mostly use she/her pronouns, although won't object to they/them. I like my "feminine" name -- I chose it myself years ago for reasons unrelated to gender and I have no plans to change it again. In terms of gender presentation I'm usually somewhere in the "tomboy femme" zone. Basically, I've been through a medical transition but not a social transition. Which is not very common, or at least I haven't seen much representation of it! (Be the bad trans representation you want to see in the world, i guess??)

Even though the words are often used interchangeably, I feel more alliance to genderqueer as a label than nonbinary, because nonbinary feels too clinical and "third checkbox"y to me, whereas genderqueer feels more expansive and undefinable and dynamic, with space for the ways in which I both am and am not performing girlhood correctly. When pressed to pick a gender word for myself, that one feels the closest. But if I'm filling out a government form or whatever? Yeah sure F is fine.

A lot of where I land with this stuff, though, is just kind of relaxing my grip on language. Top surgery was a relief, it helped me feel present in and connected to my body. Ultimately it doesn't matter much to me how much of that was *gender* dysphoria and how much of it was just... something I wanted, a way to make my body feel more like mine, to align my mental image of myself with the thing I had to stuff into clothes and walk around the city every day. I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, and in making our lives as easy and comfortable and joyful as we can for ourselves, without needing to have a clean and tidy explanation for our choices. It is very possible to know with reasonable certainty that you want something, that it will be a net positive for your life, without being able to articulate, even to yourself, WHY you want it. It doesn't need to have a bigger meaning than ahh yes, this feels right. At this point in my life, I'm more invested in marveling at the sheer improbability of my own existence than in wedging myself into the taxonomy of known and acceptable gender narratives. I'm just a person, here for the merest twinkle of a moment in cosmic history, making soup and knitting baby hats and admiring bugs and singing off-key and cutting my own hair and doing my gosh darn best to light my tiny patch of night sky with stories so that you (and you, and you) feel less alone on your own journey through the unfurling dark. Gender is just such an inconsequential detail in the narrative of my life, and pretty open to reader interpretation anyway.

Not having to wear bras is pretty great though ngl

[sparklemaia]

in this household we support the noise-cancelling headphones lifestyle 😤

[sparklemaia]

I mean yes I've been resting but I also worked 160 hours this month🫠

[sparklemaia]

might have cried a little bit while reading your comics, they’re so good!

😭😭😭 I love crying about comics, tysm ❤️

[sparklemaia]

Haven’t seen anything from you in a while. Just making sure you’re okay.

Yes! I am alive! I'm in the last push to get my End of Year Final Projects done for comic book school which is omg so much work. My body is held together with k tape and prayers lol but here are some Upset Children from my current (undisclosed) project for your viewing pleasure

[sparklemaia]

kids need safe places to play. kids need safe places. ceasefire. ceasefire. ceasefire.

[sparklemaia]

the horrors (seasonal depression) persist but so do i

[sparklemaia]

[sparklemaia]

...and then i cried.

this journal comic brought to you very late by the two (TWO!) bouts of covid I had during my first semester at comic book school.

hey did you know that I have a substack and it's free (or $5/mo if you're feelin' froggy and like to know Secrets) and it sends my comics etc. directly to your inbox??? it's true! I hate capitalism but I love drawin' stuff and I love YOUu ❤️

[sparklemaia]

first week of comic book school and i accidentally turned in one of my school library books to the united states postal service

immediately pANICKED

receipt:

good news though, a very amused postal worker called me and then delivered my book to the school P.O. box, and I was NOT banned from the school library for eternity as I'd feared

[sparklemaia]

got to hang out with Maia Kobabe (@redgoldsparks) in October when e came to my school as a Visiting Artist, and it went pretty much exactly like this

[sparklemaia]

hey i'm not sure if you've answered anything like this already but did you get any grief from the doctors/system/any of it for wanting top surgery and not being strictly binary trans or even nonbinary in the assumed they/them sense? did you get a dysphoria diagnosis or do informed consent? in any case, it's amazing to see people with similar feelings to mine, thanks for sharing your experience ;D

Hi! I am very, very, very lucky because the city where I was living when I got my top surgery has a lot of good protections and resources for queer folks. Even though I did have to jump through some typical systemic hoops to get insurance to cover it, I didn't really encounter any unnecessary gatekeeping related to gender. I easily got a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (without having to lie) from the in-house social worker. It was literally a single one-hour phone appointment and then I had my letter; I didn't have to do extensive therapy or meet any HRT requirements or anything else. The letter basically said I am nonbinary and have had persistent and acute gender dysphoria that would be alleviated by top surgery. It wasn't a problem that I use she/her pronouns and a feminine name. At surgery time, the whole surgical team was clearly educated on gender expansiveness, and easily used my name and pronouns correctly without seeming confused or skeptical. Aside from some scheduling hiccups, it was such a streamlined and affirming experience, and I wish it could be this way for everyone everywhere. Like, if you want top surgery, for any reason, no matter what your relationship to gender is -- you deserve it. I feel like top surgery IMMEDIATELY resolved like 90% of my gender anxiety. It's the best medical decision I've ever made for myself. I'm relieved EVERY day that my chest is finally MINE.